Heart Of Darkness Metaphors

One of the first passages come across in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is the “Romans” portion of the text, marking the beginning of Marlow’s lengthy narrative. This small fabrication of what inconveniences a Roman Commander could have endured during the conquest of Britain is laden with parallels and metaphors within the language that essentially end up mirroring the entirety of Marlow’s own experience in the Congo. This is most evidently shown when Marlow begins to discuss the ships the commander drove down the Thames river: “Imagine him here-the very end of the world, a sea the colour of lead, a sky the colour of smoke, a kind of ship as rigid as a concertina--and going up the river with store, or orders, or what you like. Sand banks,

These comparisons continue on in the passage, another notable one found at the very end, the tone and word choice of it seemingly representing the path he could follow in the Congo: “The fascination of the abomination--you know, imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.” (Conrad, pg 8). As is shown in the ending, Marlow does not entirely pursue this fate, but meets a man who has: Kurtz. While it does not seem that Kurtz despises the Congo, he is truly fascinated by what he, as well as other Europeans at the time, saw as an abomination. While Kurtz thought it was unacceptable to live as the people of the Congo were living, he took an extreme interest, specifically in the manipulation of

This is first brought up in this same Roman discussion, mainly within his word choice, when he says, “I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago. . . . Light came out of this river since--...like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker--may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.” (Conrad, pg 8). By recognizing this darkness that was there before the British were what he would call civilized, the word choice of this passage is revealed to set up this imperialistic notion of being human. In this story, Marlow exemplifies this colonial misconception, that being the belief that one must live as those of Europe live to be truly a person. While this is known to be false in modern times, in Conrad’s day, it was expected to hold this belief and it managed to seep its way into his writing. Still, it could be argued that Conrad was trying to point out this belief as the true darkness of man. However, this is a flawed argument as, in his work, he still managed to speak of the natives as nothing more than idiotic savages, thus making that assumption in the Romans passage and throughout Heart of Darkness a