Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad - Essay Example

Marlow is increasingly incensed and bitterly amused with the “pilgrims” of the Station, whom he sees as childishly and ineffectually backbiting gossips for won't of anything better to do.  It is as if he hates them for trying to impose the old codes of their industrialist society in the atmosphere of the Station; or rather that he hates that this society is inapplicable, though he won’t admit it, focusing on the clownishness of the Station’s inhabitants instead of the clownishness of the larger underlying situation.  In terms of connections with larger themes, Marlow sees the “pilgrims” as shallow masks mouthing the words of the old society, with nothing underneath:  “it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him,” the narrator states, “and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe” (Conrad 57). 

Although he is angry enough about the sham of the imperialist façade, Marlow does not explore the possibilities that this brings up; while seeing the failure of the Station society to come to terms with its surroundings, he nonetheless allies himself with them, as when he moves away from the beaten native servant in disgust to speak with the brick-maker.  In a more empathetic narrative, Marlow might come around to seeing things from the servant’s point of view.  It might be argued that he does this at times, as when he sees and imagines the servants and some of the “reclaimed” at the first outpost.  What Marlow is really doing here, though, is projecting his own fears and thoughts onto them, rather than being truly empathetic. 

Marlow, as he travels from Europe into the Congo, sees less and less of the individuals within his supporting society, and begins to see himself as the lone true portrayer of its mechanisms. One of his last real contacts with this society is a doctor who tells him that “It would be interesting for science to watch the mental changes of individuals” (Conrad 38) who are in his position. Marlow recalls this statement on his first trek inland, when he is confronted with the scene in which the bearers upset his ill companion, who in turn cries for their blood. He sees this scene through the eyes of an imperialist rapt with the terror of the exotic rather than as an empathetic human being.

As he gets further away from a societal group that may support his mental state of the visiting conqueror, Marlow’s psychological crucible is heated to a point where the guarded terror of his surroundings begins to overwhelm him. Later, when he sees one of the “reclaimed” natives raise a rifle, he thinks that it is because of “white men being so much alike at a distance that he could not tell who I might be” (Conrad 43). As it is, though, without any sort of empathy for the native culture, Marlow confines himself within his own society, and when its views fail him, he sinks into his own musings.

In Heart of Darkness, Marlow encounters the scattered outposts of the imperialist regime.