Heart of Darkness
Questions for Reading
1. As Marlow travels up the river, what does he observe about the Europeans? The native Africans? Which are more barbaric?
2. Kurtz is introduced in this part of the story, but is not present himself. What do you learn about him through the accounts of others? How is he characterized?
3. How do the General Manager, the accountant, and the brickmaker all compare? How are each of these men characterized?
4. What about the European men employed by The Company perturbs Marlow the most? Is it their treatment of the natives or something else?
Notes on Reading:
As Marlow travels up the river, he reaches the Company’s Outer Station, which has rusty and broken down equipment and African “workers” who are doing extremely difficult manual labor for no apparent reason at all. Marlow also witnesses old and sick native people under the shade trees in the forest, waiting for death (The Grove of Death). All of this is disconcerting and quite terrible to see, but he presses on. He encounters the Chief Accountant, who has a clean, crisply ironed white uniform, in stark contrast to the filth around him. He alerts Marlow to look out for Kurtz, who he claims is bringing in more ivory than anyone else and is surely going to earn himself a high place in The Company as a result. It becomes clear that Chief Accountant is annoyed by the intrusions of the African people, even if they are in dire need of assistance.
Anything that disturbs his accounting bothers him.
Marlow continues on a 300 mile journey to the Central Station on which the only other white man becomes ill and none of the native people help him. When Marlow finally arrives, he is informed that the ship he is supposed to sail has sunk supposedly due to an inexperienced captain sailing it before Marlow arrived. The General Manager explains that it will be about three months before the ship can be repaired. When Marlow is telling his friends about this on the Nellie (as the story is narrated, so after he returns to England), he reveals that he suspected the General Manager may have hoped the ship would sink, so he purposely assigned the inexperienced captain to sail it.
It then becomes Marlow’s job to repair the sunken ship, so as he does that, he watches how the employees of The Company wander around all day doing nothing of use to anyone with no apparent purpose. In fact, no one seems to have much of a purpose and he becomes more and more curious to meet Kurtz, who at least seems to be purposefully bringing in ivory, albeit by nefarious means. Marlow meets the Brickmaker, who he believes to be a spy for The Company, because he lives in much nicer accommodations than most and he keeps trying to get information from Marlow due to his aunt’s connections. Marlow exploits this a bit to get the parts he needs to repair the ship more quickly, though this doesn’t work. Marlow is stuck without the parts he needs to finish the ship repair and though he meets the greedy pilgrims, the rest of this part is mostly filled with his frustration at waiting and wondering about Kurtz.
