'Marlow in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness\r'

'In feeling of Darkness Conrad tries to deal with issues which atomic number 18 almost inexpressible.  The orphic effect of the jungle wilderness on Kurtz, and on Marlow himself, puzzles the imagination and bewilders the bring ining.  We might ask why Conrad chooses to spend a penny notice (of) the tier through the character of Marlow, rather than further if to set it as a first individual annals.  The story is, in fact, closely Kurtz, and near the way of life that contact with the primitive touches on the satisfyingity d induce the stairs hu small-arm civilization, but it is also interpreter of Marlow’s autobiography.Marlow is a character, not just a narrative voice, and his characterization enables us to estimate and understand what he tells us.  He stands for certain impressive set †the practicality of the diddly-squat’s life, the belief in the value of work, the refusal to judge too quickly, and the calmness of mind which allows him to consider and do to the ambiguities in Kurtz’s experience. With his detached and skeptical manner, the harvesting of a life among practical things, he makes the terrible story as believable as is possible.  We do not identify with him exactly, and he is not manifestly the voice of Conrad, but he is a convincing and unpretentious storyteller who offers us glimpses into the ineffable.Much of the earlier part of the novel is concerned with establishing Marlow’s character and authentication as a narrator.  The actual narrator who speaks on the first page tells us that Marlow is the strain of jak who is â€Å"trus bothrthiness personified” (5).  But he is â€Å"not normal” (8) in that â€Å"to him the meaning of an episode was not deep down like a kernel but outside, enwrap the chronicle” (8), which perhaps prepares us for Marlow’s seek to convey to us the scale of his experience and its importance.  The maritime t raditions and habits of mind are central to Marlow.  He values work over fantasy.  At the jungle point â€Å"I went to work… In that way totally it seemed to me I could keep my hold on the redeem facts of life” (33), which is a vital and mature proneness in him.  His instincts are to reject nonsense and ridiculousness and stick to the trustworthy.Talking to the ridiculous agentive role at the station, â€Å"this papier-mâché Mephistopheles” (37), he tells us of his horror of lies, not be start out he is curiously virtuous, but because â€Å" at that smudge is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies †which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world” (38-9).  The agent’s insinuating invitation to Marlow to accept his petty corruptions meets with an instinctive flush that speaks for his faithfulness.  Every man wants to come up on, says the agent. â€Å"What more did I want? What I really wanted was riv ets, by heaven!  Rivets.  To bewitch on with the work” (40).  in that respect is something wonderfully refreshing about such profound disgust, and this contributes largely to our readiness to listen to Marlow as the tale reaches its most critical stages.It was a relief, he says to get back to the work of repairing the steamboat, not because he in truth likes labor, â€Å"but I like what is in the work, †the bump to find yourself.  Your own reality…” (41). A knock-down(a) moment for him is the discovery in the riverside shanty of Towson’s manual on diddly-shitship, which, in the gist of the chaotic world of the jungle, gives him â€Å"a delicious thaumaturgist of having come upon something unmistakably real” (54), for the real is what he longs for, as the guarantee of sanity and purpose.  It reassures him that the book has been analyse and cared for, the spine â€Å"lovingly stitched afresh with sportsmanlike cotton thr ead” (54) and the margin annotated with what he thinks is scratch but later discovers to be Russian.If Marlow’s integrity and devotion to the real is created thoroughly, so are his attitudes to what he experiences before he meets Kurtz.  Conrad gives him a style that is consistent.  He is skeptical, a little sardonic, and down-to earth.  He tells how he worked on his relations to try to ensure that he could go to Africa:The men said â€Å"My dear Fellow,” and did nothing.  Then †would you believe it? †I tried the women.  I, Charlie Marlow, set the women to work †to get a job.  Heavens!  Well, you see, the imprint drove me.  I had an auntie, a dear enthusiastic soul.  She wrote: â€Å"It will be de promiscuousful…” (12)The voice is familiar, humorous and unaffected, and we feel any reason to trust what he says.  His devotion to the real makes him immediately sensitive to dis truth and elicitt.  His view of â€Å" hop on” is justifiably jaundiced.  The captain whom he replaces has been killed; â€Å"I address the original quarrel arose from a misunderstanding about some hens” (13), and he is sure that afterwards â€Å"the cause of progress got them, anyhow” (14).  His charge is â€Å"a two-penny-half-penny river steamboat with a penny whistle attached” (18) and he feels that his aunt chats â€Å"rot” when she describes him as â€Å"an emissary of light” (18).  He records the bizarre sight of a French warship lobbing shells into the jungle to destroy â€Å"enemies” (20).He is bewildered by the sight of the accountant at the station in his â€Å"high starched collar, blanched cuffs, a light alpaca jacket, snowy trousers…” (25) working alongside the black workmen who are dying in the grass.  He encounters a white man who has the job of maintaining the alley.  He is drunk, and â€Å"Can’t say I saw any road or any upkeep, unless the body of a old negro, with a bullet-hole in the forehead, upon which I absolutely stumbled terzetto miles further on, may be considered a aeonian improvement” (29).  The man who tries to put out the sunburn in the store shed carries a lay and declares â€Å"that foreverybody was ‘behaving splendidly, splendidly,’ dipped about a quart of weewee and tore back again.  I noticed there was a hole in the bottom of his bucket” (33).Everywhere Marlow’s shrewd and ironical intelligence descry the signs of decay, corruption and self-deception.  The whole establishment at the jungle trading station is â€Å"unreal” (35), and when the manager starts canting about Marlow being â€Å"of the new gang †the gang of law” (36) â€Å"I nearly burst into a laugh” (36).  The whole experience has for him the insane logic of dream, â€Å"that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and b afflement in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is the very subject matter of dreams…” (39).Such judgments and descriptions strike the reader as immensely attentive and yet modestly expressed.  Marlow feels fundamental decencies being abuse by the colonial trading world, and it is hardly move that he becomes increasingly interested in Kurtz, who is clearly feared as easy as despised by the other agents, largely because he has some sort of vision, a commodity seriously lacking in the ivory trading world.  Marlow’s convincing honesty and down-to-earth qualities even make Conrad’s symbol easy to approach.The Fate-like create from raw stuff women in the Brussels postal service are entirely real as easy as allusive.  One wears a dress â€Å"as plain as an umbrella cover” (14).  Marlow notes how the two women introduce many â€Å"to the unknown… these two, guarding the door of D arkness, knitting black wool as for a doting pall” (16).  It is a rare and powerful effect, not clumsy, as it might have been, because we are so convinced by Marlow’s practical and down-to-earth attitude.When it comes to the encounter with Kurtz we are therefore ready to give Marlow the benefit of the doubt as he reveals his own complex attitude to the man, and tries to explain what it is that Kurtz has seen and felt.  It is Kurtz’s high-mindedness that first interests him, here in this nightmare place of unreason.  The other agents laugh at his hope that â€Å" apiece station should be like a beacon on the road towards better things, a shopping mall for trade of course, but also for humanising” (47).  At the akin time Marlow cannot escape the thought that the gaga figures seen on the bank are not inhuman, â€Å"the thought of your extraneous kinship with this wild and passionate uproar” (51) and we can see how he might understand how Kurtz’s own soul has been captured by the darkness.He finds that he wants to talk to Kurtz, even though he realizes as currently as he gets to Kurtz’s station that â€Å"He had taken a high seat among the devils of the make for” (70), something Marlow knows will be almost impossible for his sense of hearing to understand; â€Å"How could you? †with solid pavement under your feet, contact by kind neighbours…” (70).  This is where Marlow’s story moves into the expanse of the incredible and the solo partly expressible  Kurtz’s high-minded writings end suddenly with the savage cry â€Å"Exterminate all the brutes” (72).  The â€Å"brother seaman” talks of how Kurtz has inspired him †â€Å"I tell you…this man has enlarged my mind” (78).  But Marlow can only conclude â€Å"Why! He’s demented” (81) despite the Russian’s protests.The skulls are the conclusion of his total breakdown, that the darkness â€Å"had whispered to him things about himself that he did no know” (83). The spell of the wilderness had change â€Å"forgotten and brutal instincts” (94) in him and dragged his soul â€Å"beyond the bounds of permitted aspirations” (95).  Marlow is able to see Kurtz’s story as a tragedy.  His aim had been to â€Å"Live rightly, run, die” (99) but he had not known what was in himself, and Marlow’s readiness to stand by him at the end, even to rescue him in a way, rests on an awareness that Kurtz was not despicable, and that he himself might well respond in the same way.â€Å"He had make that last stride, he had stepped over the edge, while I had been permitted to draw back my hesitating foot” (101).  grit in Europe, like Gulliver, he is disgusted by his fellow man, â€Å"like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger” (102), and he lies to Kurtz’s â⠂¬Å"intended” because neither she nor anyone else would be able to comprehend the truth.Marlow does not claim to know or understand everything.  It is the unassuming nature of his narrative stance that convinces us.  The â€Å"real” narrator calls the whole thing â€Å"one of Marlow’s inconclusive experiences” (10). But no one could be omniscient with such a subject; Marlow only glimpses one of the great mysteries, and none of us is ever granted more than that.  What Conrad has done is to choose a narrative method and a type of narrator which conveys as well as possible immensely difficult things.Works CitedConrad, Joseph.  Heart of Darkness.  Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.\r\n'