When I read the part of the manager and his uncle’s discussion about Kurtz. I feel a twisted sense of morality. They feel that Kurtz wants to take over the manager’s position. They are willing to do anything that will get him or his assistant the Russian hanged, so that the trading field might be leveled to their advantage.
For chapter 2, lots of things happen during Marlow is leaving on a two-month trip up the river to Kurtz, along with the manager and several “pilgrims”. The river is dangerous and the trip is difficult. Even though I trying to ignore racism in this book and focus on other things, in this scene, I still feel Africans in this book are mostly objects: Marlow refers to his helmsman as a piece of machinery. As narrator says,
“An athletic black belonging to some coast tribe. He was the most unstable kind of fool I had ever seen. He steered with no end of a swagger while you were by; but if he lost sight of you, he became instantly the prey of an abject funk, and would let that cripple of a steamboat get the upper hand of him in a minute.”
Africans become a mere backdrop for Marlow, against which he can play out his philosophical and existential struggles. It presents a set of issues surrounding race that is ultimately troubling.
I also found a symbol, fog that contributes to this theme. Fog is a sort of corollary to darkness. Fog not only obscures but distorts: it gives one just enough information to begin making decisions but no way to judge the accuracy of that information, which often ends up being wrong. Marlow’s steamer is caught in the fog, meaning that he has no idea where he’s going and no idea whether peril lies ahead. And the further meaning is what seems to be right, just and enlightened now are actually wrong, unjust and guilty.
My question is: What does the title “Heart of Darkness” mean? Is it the darkness which is hidden under the white skin?