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Heart Of Darkness

 

            Heart of Darkness opens on a boat called "Nellie." Marlow and his shipmates, including the .
             narrator whose descriptions of the scene fill the few breaks in Marlow's stories, loll on the .
             deck waiting for the tides of the Thames River to change. To entertain his compatriots, Marlow .
             begins to talk about his philosophies on colonization, his personal history, and his voyage up .
             the Congo River into the heart of Africa. Like many storytellers, Marlow speaks in a stream of .
             consciousness, skipping forward and backward in time without warning. The reader is left to .
             infer from symbolism the specifics of Marlow's narrative. Marlow abhors colonization. He .
             believes that when Europeans colonize other countries to exploit rather than to civilize, white .
             men commit robbery and murder on "a great scale." His urgent feelings regarding colonization .
             trigger Marlow to remember his trip into Africa. However, before he begins that specific story .
             he tells his audience about his fascination with maps and "empty spaces." Since he was a child, .
             Marlow dreamed of venturing into the dark places on maps. He gets a great chance, he explains, .
             when his aunt helps him secure a position working for a European-based ivory company as a .
             steamboat captain. Marlow's journey from London to the mouth of the Congo River quickly begins .
             and as the steamboat chugs down the impenetrable coastline, briefly stopping at French stations .
             to load and unload soldiers, docking with a French battleship upon which sailors died at a rate .
             of three per day. Marlow's disillusion and fascination grows as he approaches the first ivory .
             station. Rusted machinery, ill workers, and cluttered unkept grounds greet Marlow at the first .
             station. The native workers are horribly treated while the white characters suffer from disease, biting insects, and staggering heat. Marlow finally leaves the station to begin a two hundred mile inland trek to the second station.


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