Important Quotations Explained
1. “The
word ‘ivory’ rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would
think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew
through it all, like a whiff from some corpse. By Jove! I’ve never
seen anything so unreal in my life. And outside, the silent wilderness
surrounding this cleared speck on the earth struck me as something
great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for
the passing away of this fantastic invasion.”
This quote, from the fourth section
of Part I, offers Marlow’s initial impression of the Central Station.
The word “ivory” has taken on a life of its own for the men who
work for the Company. To them, it is far more than the tusk of an
elephant; it represents economic freedom, social advancement, an
escape from a life of being an employee. The word has lost all connection
to any physical reality and has itself become an object of worship.
Marlow’s reference to a decaying corpse is both literal and figurative:
elephants and native Africans both die as a result of the white
man’s pursuit of ivory, and the entire enterprise is rotten at the
core. The cruelties and the greed are both part of a greater, timeless
evil, yet they are petty in the scheme of the greater order of the
natural world.
2. “In
a few days the Eldorado Expedition went into the patient wilderness,
that closed upon it as the sea closes over a diver. Long afterwards
the news came that all the donkeys were dead. I know nothing as
to the fate of the less valuable animals. They, no doubt, like the
rest of us, found what they deserved. I did not inquire.”
During the first section of Part II,
Marlow watches the Eldorado Exploring Expedition, a band of freelance
bandits, reequip and then depart from the Central Station. This
enigmatic report is the only news he receives concerning their fate.
The dry irony of this quote is characteristic of Marlow, who by
this point has truly come to see white men as the “less valuable
animals.” Although he chalks up the Expedition’s fate to some idea
of destiny or just reward, Marlow has already come to distrust such
moral formulations: this is why he does not seek further information
about the Expedition. Again he mentions a “patient wilderness”:
the Expedition’s fate is insignificant in the face of larger catastrophes
and even less meaningful when considered in the scope of nature’s
time frame.
3. “It
was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were not inhuman. Well,
you know, that was the worst of it—the suspicion of their not being
inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and
spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the
thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote
kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was
ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself
that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the
terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being
a meaning in it which you—you so remote from the night of first
ages—could comprehend. And why not?”
As Marlow journeys up the
river toward the Inner Station in the first section of Part II,
he catches occasional glimpses of native villages along the riverbanks.
More often, though, he simply hears things: drums, chants, howls.
These engage his imagination, and the fact that they do so troubles
him, because it suggests, as he says, a “kinship” with these men,
whom he has so far been able to classify as “inhuman.” This moment
is one of several in the text in which Marlow seems to admit the
limits of his own perception. These moments allow for a reading
of Heart of Darkness that is much more critical of colonialism and
much more ironic about the stereotypes it engenders. Nevertheless,
it is important to notice that Marlow still casts Africans as a
primitive version of himself rather than as potential equals.
4. “The
brown current ran swiftly out of the heart of darkness, bearing
us down towards the sea with twice the speed of our upward progress;
and Kurtz’s life was running swiftly, too, ebbing, ebbing out of
his heart into the sea of inexorable time. . . . I saw the time
approaching when I would be left alone of the party of ‘unsound
method.’”
This quote, which comes as the steamer
begins its voyage back from the Inner Station in the third section
of Part III, with Kurtz and his ivory aboard, brings together the
images of the river and the “heart of darkness” which it penetrates.
The river is something that separates Marlow from the African interior:
while on the river he is exterior to, even if completely surrounded
by, the jungle. Furthermore, despite its “brown current,” the river
inexorably brings him back to white civilization. The first sentence
of this quote suggests that Marlow and Kurtz have been able to leave
the “heart of darkness” behind, but Kurtz’s life seems to be receding
along with the “darkness,” and Marlow, too, has been permanently
scarred by it, since he is now ineradicably marked as being of Kurtz’s
party. Thus, it seems that the “darkness” is in fact internalized,
that it is part of some fundamental if ironic “unsoundness.”
5. “I
was within a hair’s-breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement,
and I found with humiliation that probably I would have nothing
to say. This is the reason why I affirm that Kurtz was a remarkable
man. He had something to say. He said it. . . . He had summed up—he
had judged. ‘The horror!’ He was a remarkable man.”
At the beginning of the final section
of Part III, Marlow has just recovered from his near-fatal illness.
His “nothing to say” is not reflective of a lack of substance but
rather of his realization that anything he might have to say would
be so ambiguous and so profound as to be impossible to put into
words. Kurtz, on the other hand, is “remarkable” for his ability
to cut through ambiguity, to create a definite “something.” Paradoxically,
though, the final formulation of that “something” is so vague as
to approach “nothing”: “ ‘The horror!’ ” could be almost anything.
However, perhaps Kurtz is most fascinating to Marlow because he
has had the courage to judge, to deny ambiguity. Marlow is aware
of Kurtz’s intelligence and the man’s appreciation of paradox, so
he also knows that Kurtz’s rabid systematization of the world around
him has been an act and a lie. Yet Kurtz, on the strength of his
hubris and his charisma, has created out of himself a way of organizing
the world that contradicts generally accepted social models. Most
important, he has created an impressive legacy: Marlow will ponder
Kurtz’s words (“ ‘The horror!’ ”) and Kurtz’s memory for the rest
of his life. By turning himself into an enigma, Kurtz has done the
ultimate: he has ensured his own immortality.
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