Marlow’s discovery of the stack of firewood
through the attack on the steamer.
Summary: Part 2
Fifty miles away from Kurtz’s Inner Station, the steamer
sights a hut with a stack of firewood and a note that says, “Wood
for you. Hurry up. Approach cautiously.” The signature is illegible,
but it is clearly not Kurtz’s. Inside the hut, Marlow finds a battered
old book on seamanship with notes in the margin in what looks like
code. The manager concludes that the wood must have been left by
the Russian trader, a man about whom Marlow has overheard the manager complaining.
After taking aboard the firewood that serves as the ship’s fuel,
the party continues up the river, the steamer struggling and threatening
at every moment to give out completely. Marlow ponders Kurtz constantly
as they crawl along toward him.
By the evening of the second day after finding the hut,
they arrive at a point eight miles from Kurtz’s station. Marlow
wants to press on, but the manager tells him to wait for daylight,
as the waters are dangerous here. The night is strangely still and
silent, and dawn brings an oppressive fog. The fog lifts suddenly
and then falls again just as abruptly. The men on the steamer hear
a loud, desolate cry, followed by a clamor of savage voices, and
then silence again. They prepare for attack. The whites are badly
shaken, but the African crewmen respond with quiet alertness. The
leader of the cannibals tells Marlow matter-of-factly that his people
want to eat the owners of the voices in the fog. Marlow realizes
that the cannibals must be terribly hungry, as they have not been
allowed to go ashore to trade for supplies, and their only food,
a supply of rotting hippo meat, was long since thrown overboard
by the pilgrims.
The manager authorizes Marlow to take every risk in continuing on
in the fog, but Marlow refuses to do so, as they will surely ground the
steamer if they proceed blindly. Marlow says he does not think the
natives will attack, particularly since their cries have sounded more
sorrowful than warlike. After the fog lifts, at a spot a mile and a
half from the station, the natives attempt to repulse the invaders. The
steamer is in a narrow channel, moving along slowly next to a high
bank overgrown with bushes, when suddenly the air fills with arrows.
Marlow rushes inside the pilot-house. When he leans out to close
the shutter on the window, he sees that the brush is swarming with
natives. Suddenly, he notices a snag in the river a short way ahead
of the steamer.
The pilgrims open fire with rifles from below him, and
the cloud of smoke they produce obscures his sight. Marlow’s African
helmsman leaves the wheel to open the shutter and shoot out with
a one-shot rifle, and then stands at the open window yelling at
the unseen assailants on the shore. Marlow grabs the wheel and crowds
the steamer close to the bank to avoid the snag. As he does so,
the helmsman takes a spear in his side and falls on Marlow’s feet.
Marlow frightens the attackers away by sounding the steam whistle
repeatedly, and they give off a prolonged cry of fear and despair.
One of the pilgrims enters the pilot-house and is shocked to see
the wounded helmsman. The two white men stand over him as he dies
quietly. Marlow makes the repulsed and indignant pilgrim steer while
he changes his shoes and socks, which are covered in the dead man’s blood.
Marlow expects that Kurtz is now dead as well, and he feels a terrible
disappointment at the thought.
One of Marlow’s listeners breaks into his narrative at
this point to comment upon the absurdity of Marlow’s behavior. Marlow laughs
at the man, whose comfortable bourgeois existence has never brought
him into contact with anything the likes of Africa. He admits that
his own behavior may have been ridiculous—he did, after all, throw
a pair of brand-new shoes overboard in response to the helmsman’s
death—but he notes that there is something legitimate about his
disappointment in thinking he will never be able to meet the man
behind the legend of Kurtz.
Read a translation of
Part 2 →
Analysis
Marlow makes a major error of interpretation
in this section, when he decides that the cries coming from the
riverbank do not portend an attack. That he is wrong is more or
less irrelevant, since the steamer has no real ability to escape.
The fog that surrounds the boat is literal and metaphorical: it
obscures, distorts, and leaves Marlow with only voices and words
upon which to base his judgments. Indeed, this has been Marlow’s
situation for much of the book, as he has had to formulate a notion
of Kurtz based only on secondhand accounts of the man’s exploits
and personality. This has been both enriching and dangerous for Marlow.
On the one hand, having the figure of Kurtz available as an object
for contemplation has provided a release for Marlow, a distraction
from his unsavory surroundings, and Kurtz has also functioned as
a kind of blank slate onto which Marlow can project his own opinions
and values. Kurtz gives Marlow a sense of possibility. At the same
time, Marlow’s fantasizing about Kurtz has its hazards. By becoming
intrigued with Kurtz, Marlow becomes dangerously alienated from,
and disliked by, the Company’s representatives. Moreover, Marlow
focuses his energies and hopes on a man who may be nothing like
the legends surrounding him. However, with nothing else to go on
and no other alternatives to the manager and his ilk, Marlow has
little choice.
