Heart of Darkness: Marlow’s Heroic Cry

Aboard the Nellie, dusk settling as the tide ebbs on the Thames estuary, Marlow sits apart from the small group of men with whom he shares ‘the bond of the sea’ (p. 52). To them he recounts the story of his adventures in the Congo and his meeting with the extraordinary Mr Kurtz. The journey has been long and Marlow has himself been changed; the man who speaks is not the same as when he first joined the colonial enterprise. Marlow treats this earlier self as a distinct character, one not at all privileged, but subjected to varied ironies, great and small, throughout the narrative. This Marlow of the central tale is no fool, however; when recognition becomes possible, the ironies of situation, event, character, and so on, do not escape him. What distinguishes him later as narrator is an ironic vision larger than any particular situation or mode, a sense of general irony2 which acknowledges the fundamental paradoxes of the story, of his efforts on the Nellie to recount it, and of man’s desire to act meaningfully in the ‘flash of lightening’ (p. 49) that is the duration of civilization.