RR: Heart of Darkness

As Marlow arrives to the First Station, we can already tell that the atmosphere is not pleasant, “an undersized railway-truck lying there on its back with its wheels in the air…the thing looked as dead as the carcass of some animal”. The railway-truck is used as a metaphor to describe the environment that Marlow is seeing, which are “dead animals”. The diction in this passage is negative and dark, “dark things, smoke, war, enemies, deathlike, devil, greed, violence, Inferno.” The way I imagine what Marlow is describing this place to be is an image of a hell-like place. He perceives the station to be this horrible place of violence and when he wants to get away from it by “going under the trees for shade” he realizes that he is in a place of no good. When Marlow encounters the six men, “they walked erect and slow, black rags were wound round their loins, I could see every rib, the joints of their limbs were like knots in a rope; each had an iron collar on his neck, and all were connected together with a chain”, it is revealed that they are treated like animals, chained together with iron collars around their neck. Marlow doesn’t understand how these people can be called enemies, when they are treated as criminals in their own country. These six men pass Marlow with “deathlike indifference of unhappy savages”, which suggests these men are treated like animals. In addition, we know that Marlow is completely horrified by what he sees because he says, “I’ve seen the devil of violence, greed and hot desire…But…” the conjunction “but” shows Marlow’s change in emotion and that this place is in fact the “heart of darkness” controlled by men with no morals. As Marlow is completely appalled with what he sees, he seeks a place to go away from all this nonsense and finds a hole and Marlow realizes that he has stepped into a “gloomy circle of some Inferno”.