![]() Even the steamboat's initial wreck is "too stupid.to be altogether natural" (33). The other man Marlow speaks to is a spy who avoids ordering the rivets needed to fix the steamer and save the sick Kurtz this spy wants to let Kurtz die so he cannot become the manager. The manager of the station's defining characteristic is his inscrutability: "it was impossible to tell what could control such a man. Marlow's efforts to understand the situation by talking to his companions are futile. Africa is a grand mystery watching its coast "is like thinking about an enigma" (19) natives are "hidden out of sight somewhere" (21) the chip's captain tells Marlow that an anonymous Swede has hanged himself, "who knows" (23) why. In Africa, Marlow looks for comprehensibility, only to find a mess of mystery, deceit, and futility in both the continent itself and the men who work there. Just as the Romans in Britain, "men going at it blind-as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness" (9), like the Europeans in Africa, are swathed in darkness, so too is Marlow's tale. The "heart of darkness" typically refers to the darkness of the human heart, or to the heart of "darkest Africa", or even to the secret of evil, but it also refers to the darkness of incomprehension and ignorance. His tale has no moral, no illuminating clarity it begins with his mention of "one of the dark places of the earth" (6) and ends with "it would have been too dark" (131). The meaning of his story, then, will be as difficult to grasp as a "misty halo" (7). The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity.Marlow was not typical.to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside" (7). According to the narrator, a seaman on shore "generally.finds the secret not worth knowing. Marlow only gradually comes to understand his experiences, and even as he is telling his story sometimes struggles to explain the significance of what has occurred. Heart of Darkness is narrated primarily in the first person, by the character Charlie Marlow, and is filtered through the viewpoint of an anonymous third-person hearer.
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