Marlow’s return to Brussels through the conclusion.
Summary: Part 3
Marlow barely survives his illness. Eventually
he returns to the “sepulchral city,” Brussels. He resents the people
there for their petty self-importance and smug complacency. His
aunt nurses him back to health, but his disorder is more emotional
than physical. A bespectacled representative of the Company comes
to retrieve the packet of papers Kurtz entrusted to Marlow, but Marlow
will give him only the pamphlet on the “Suppression of Savage Customs,”
with the postscript (the handwritten “Exterminate all the brutes!”)
torn off. The man threatens legal action to obtain the rest of the
packet’s contents. Another man, calling himself Kurtz’s cousin,
appears and takes some letters to the family. The cousin tells him
that Kurtz had been a great musician, although he does not elaborate
further. Marlow and the cousin ponder Kurtz’s myriad talents and
decide that he is best described as a “universal genius.” A journalist
colleague of Kurtz’s appears and takes the pamphlet for publication.
This man believes Kurtz’s true skills were in popular or extremist
politics.
Finally, Marlow is left with only a few letters and a
picture of Kurtz’s Intended. Marlow goes to see her without really
knowing why. Kurtz’s memory comes flooding back to him as he stands
on her doorstep. He finds the Intended still in mourning, though
it has been over a year since Kurtz’s death. He gives her the packet,
and she asks if he knew Kurtz well. He replies that he knew him
as well as it is possible for one man to know another.
His presence fulfills her need for a sympathetic ear,
and she continually praises Kurtz. Her sentimentality begins to
anger Marlow, but he holds back his annoyance until it gives way
to pity. She says she will mourn Kurtz forever, and asks Marlow
to repeat his last words to give her something upon which to sustain
herself. Marlow lies and tells her that Kurtz’s last word was her
name. She responds that she was certain that this was the case.
Marlow ends his story here, and the narrator looks off into the
dark sky, which makes the waterway seem “to lead into the heart
of an immense darkness.”
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Part 3 →
Analysis
Marlow’s series of encounters with persons from Kurtz’s
former life makes him question the value he places on his memories
of Kurtz. Kurtz’s cousin and the journalist both offer a version
of Kurtz that seems not to resemble the man Marlow knew. Kurtz,
in fact, seems to have been all things to all people—someone who
has changed their life and now serves as a kind of symbolic figure
presiding over their existence. This makes Marlow’s own experience
of Kurtz less unique and thus perhaps less meaningful. The fact
that he shares Kurtz with all of these overconfident, self-important
people, most of whom will never leave Brussels, causes Kurtz to
seem common, and less profound. In reality, Marlow’s stream of visitors
do not raise any new issues: in their excessive praise of Kurtz
and their own lack of perspective, they resemble the Russian trader,
who also took Kurtz as a kind of guru.
Marlow goes to see Kurtz’s Intended in a state of profound uncertainty.
He is unsure whether his version of Kurtz has any value either as
a reflection of reality or as a philosophical construct. In response
to the woman’s simple question as to whether he knew Kurtz well,
he can only reply that he knew him “‘as well as it is possible for
one man to know another.’” Given what the preceding narrative has
shown about the possibilities for “knowing” another person in any
meaningful sense, the reader can easily see that Marlow’s reply
to Kurtz’s Intended is a qualification, not an affirmation: Marlow
barely knows himself. By the end of Marlow’s visit with the woman,
the reader is also aware, even if Marlow is not, that the kinds
of illusions and untruths which Marlow accuses women of perpetuating
are in fact not dissimilar from those fictions men use to understand
their own experiences and justify such things as colonialism. Marlow
has much more in common with Kurtz’s Intended than he would like
to admit.
Kurtz’s Intended, like Marlow’s aunt and Kurtz’s mistress,
is a problematic female figure. Marlow praises her for her “mature capacity
for fidelity, for belief, for suffering,” suggesting that the most
valuable traits in a woman are passive. Conrad’s portrayal of the
Intended has thus been criticized for having misogynist overtones,
and there is some justification for this point of view. She is a repository
of conservative ideas about what it means to be white and European,
upholding fine-sounding but ultimately useless notions of heroism
and romance.