Marlow’s journey down the coast of Africa through his
meeting with the chief accountant.
Summary: Part 1
The French steamer takes Marlow along the coast of Africa,
stopping periodically to land soldiers and customshouse officers.
Marlow finds his idleness vexing, and the trip seems vaguely nightmarish to
him. At one point, they come across a French man-of-war shelling an
apparently uninhabited forested stretch of coast. They finally arrive
at the mouth of the Congo River, where Marlow boards another steamship
bound for a point thirty miles upriver. The captain of the ship,
a young Swede, recognizes Marlow as a seaman and invites him on
the bridge. The Swede criticizes the colonial officials and tells
Marlow about another Swede who recently hanged himself on his way
into the interior.
Marlow disembarks at the Company’s station, which is in
a terrible state of disrepair. He sees piles of decaying machinery
and a cliff being blasted for no apparent purpose. He also sees
a group of black prisoners walking along in chains under the guard
of another black man, who wears a shoddy uniform and carries a rifle.
He remarks that he had already known the “devils” of violence, greed, and
desire, but that in Africa he became acquainted with the “flabby,
pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly.”
Finally, Marlow comes to a grove of trees and, to his horror, finds
a group of dying native laborers. He offers a biscuit to one of them;
seeing a bit of white European yarn tied around his neck, he wonders
at its meaning. He meets a nattily dressed white man, the Company’s
chief accountant (not to be confused with Marlow’s friend the Accountant
from the opening of the book). Marlow spends ten days here waiting
for a caravan to the next station. One day, the chief accountant
tells him that in the interior he will undoubtedly meet Mr. Kurtz,
a first-class agent who sends in as much ivory as all the others
put together and is destined for advancement. He tells Marlow to
let Kurtz know that everything is satisfactory at the Outer Station
when he meets him. The chief accountant is afraid to send a written
message for fear it will be intercepted by undesirable elements
at the Central Station.
Read a translation of
Part 1 →
Analysis
Marlow’s description of his journey on the
French steamer makes use of an interior/exterior motif that continues
throughout the rest of the book. Marlow frequently encounters inscrutable
surfaces that tempt him to try to penetrate into the interior of
situations and places. The most prominent example of this is the French
man-of-war, which shells a forested wall of coastline. To Marlow’s
mind, the entire coastline of the African continent presents a solid
green facade, and the spectacle of European guns firing blindly
into that facade seems to be a futile and uncomprehending way of
addressing the continent.
“The flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious
and pitiless folly” is one of the central images with which Marlow
characterizes the behavior of the colonists. He refers back to this
image at a number of key points later in the story. It is thus a
very important clue as to what Marlow actually thinks is wrong about
imperialism—Marlow’s attitudes are usually implied rather than directly stated.
Marlow distinguishes this devil from violence, greed, and desire,
suggesting that the fundamental evil of imperialism is not that
it perpetrates violence against native peoples, nor that it is motivated
by greed. The flabby, weak-eyed devil seems to be distinguished
above all by being shortsighted and foolish, unaware of what it
is doing and ineffective.
The hand of the “flabby devil” is apparent in the travesties
of administration and the widespread decay in the Company’s stations.
The colonials in the coastal station spend all their time blasting
a cliff for no apparent reason, machinery lies broken all around, and
supplies are poorly apportioned, resting in abundance where they
are not needed and never sent to where they are needed. Given the
level of waste and inefficiency, this kind of colonial activity clearly
has something other than economic activity at stake, but just what
that something might be is not apparent. Marlow’s comments on the
“flabby devil” produce a very ambivalent criticism of colonialism.
Would Marlow approve of the violent exploitation and extortion of
the Africans if it was done in a more clear-sighted and effective
manner? This question is difficult to answer definitively.
On the other hand, Marlow is appalled by the
ghastly, infernal spectacle of the grove of death, while the other
colonials show no concern over it at all. For Marlow, the grove
is the dark heart of the station. Marlow’s horror at the grove suggests
that the true evils of this colonial enterprise are dehumanization
and death. All Marlow can offer these dying men are a few pieces
of biscuit, and, despite the fact that Marlow is “not particularly
tender,” the situation troubles him.