Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is the story of Charles Marlow, an English explorer working for a Belgian trading company in the colonized Congo. The novel has two narrators: Marlow's voice is dominant; the second voice is that of an English sailor listening to Marlow's tales years after his experience in the Congo. The passage in question is narrated by Marlow. It occurs in part II on page 44: "The earth seemed unearthly. (...) Of course, a fool, what with sheer fright and fine sentiments, is always safe." In brief, the scene which he describes is a particular moment on the steamship where while going down the Congo River, he sees a group of natives running by the shore creating a loud frenzy. Marlow's observations then become a reflection of something that goes a little beyond appearances. He denotes the disparities between the natives and the travelers. The passage shows Marlow's effort to appeal to European imperialist readers to convince them that the disparities between Congolese and Europeans are not as momentous as they appear.
Marlow's oratorical skill is the key element of his message. The passage seems to be divided into two bodies: the first is his description of the commotion on the shore. In this first part, he uses many negations and antitheses. It begins with "The earth seemed unearthly," which sets the tone immediately. It is the beginning of a well thought-out structure: it starts off from a so to speak distant and general perspective the natives create that promptly focuses little by little to a specific aspect of their nature. In short, he starts off by saying that through this tumultuous excitement, the earth was no longer earth-like; it became a negation of itself. These unshackled "monsters" however, could have a humanity "like yours." Marlow uses negations and contradictions to convince his audience. The natives are monsters in the eyes of the colonizers, but their humanity or the possibility of their humanity becomes all too real for Marlow. Of course, the discrepancies still exist, but so does a kind of "remote kinship." He casts his point by stating that it is "this wild and passionate uproar" which is the framework of the natives' humanity. That which seemed to distinguish the civil and the savage creates kinship.
The second part of the of the passage is reflective reasoning. Marlow's narrative drops all the negations and contradictions which made his argument seem strictly subjective. He takes on a different approach; the readers enter Marlow's mind while he contemplates the natives' humanity. The formulation of his sentences makes his speech seem more like a philosophical reasoning. The narrative still keeps its oration-like aspect. Marlow uses rhetorical questions and pauses. What he is trying to convey takes on a different turn from what it started off to be: he is no longer simply commenting on how different and yet relatable two worlds can be, but he is also (somewhat implicitly) speaking against imperialism.
The concept of duality is omnipresent in this passage. The description of the natives recalls something that you could see at a zoo or a freak show. In that image, there are men who cage and men who are caged. But the link between them is that they are both men, men that were once both of "the first ages." The matter of the mind comes up too, as a provocation to the imperialist and colonialist thinkers: there is he who sees the truth and is deserving of being called "man"; and there is he who runs from it, who can only be called "fool." It's almost as though Conrad's voice is heard through Marlow. He is showing to the Europeans that that which terrifies them so much of the natives is that they have remained men of the "first ages," whereas the colonizers have taken a different path through time. Marlow brings into question human emotions as well, and to him, these only act as tools that emphasize prejudice and prevent the clarity of truth to seep through. The reality that Marlow is portraying is that if the truth were to be "stripped of its cloak of time," then both groups of men–– natives and colonial imperialists, would be reduced to that which they were in the beginning. According to him, only a true "man" would be able to see this truth and the man who gawks and squawks at the site of the natives is he who is the fool, because that is the safest assumed position. Ironically, Marlow declares that in order for the Europeans to understand what he means, they have to be as much "men" as the natives, "he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore."
There two sides to the tone of the passage: where the story-teller ends is where the orator begins. There is a very philosophical side to what Marlow says in this passage, especially in the way that he describes it. There are many pauses and negations in this particular part and it adds to the suspense of the story-teller. But at the same time, his whole dialogue or reflection follows a logical development. Marlow is very skilled in the art of speaking and he is skilled at using poetic devices as well as tools of rhetoric. He utilizes his vivid description of the shrieks and of the freedom of these so-called "monsters," and he turns it around to a completely reversed idea. Marlow, or more specifically Conrad, knows how to reach out to his audience and appeal to them in order to get his idea and message across. From the first read even, what he is trying to say is not overall clear. The pauses in his speech give it a very authentic kind of feel. It is easy to forget in many parts of the book that everything that is being counted, is actually a recount of what had happened in the past. So it is in moments and passages like this one that the authenticity of what Marlow is saying and the context in which he is saying it becomes valid. As readers, we are called back to the scene watching Marlow tell his tale to his crew back in England. We are present in the Congo only through Marlow's memory and not through his eyes. Perhaps that is why it seems more genuine: he has had time to reflect on this episode that clearly affected him. The manner in which he retells it though seems very worked, as if he has already developped a clear idea of the significance of this seemingly trivial event. As a result, we have in this passage a kind of synthesis between the surreality a good storyteller gives to his tales, and an eloquent recount of a realization.
The passage just seems to be an early critique of European ignorance. Conrad is attempting to carry out an anti-imperial message, but his promotions of it are passive. Through the book, he never overtly declares his opinions about imperialism and colonialism. His thoughts and opinions remain sometimes ambiguous, as his character Marlow is specifically designed to be an unbiased character. But the passage in question is very significant, because he does make it relatively clear that the imperialist/colonist is a fool and the native is a man. What he says is very strong and is unlikely to have been missed by readers, but what reduces the impact of such a declaration is the manner in which he first describes the natives. It is strange the way Conrad phrases all of it, but it does seem to be with purpose. Perhaps in order to appeal and to convince an audience which is mainly prejudiced, there has to be a balance between what they expect to read and Conrad's message. By slowly giving more weight to the deeper message, Conrad aims to convince his readers that their supposed certainties about the barbarity of the African peoples is simply a refusal in recognizing equivalences.
