63 pages • 2 hours read
Heart of Darkness
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Character Analysis
Marlow
Marlow is the protagonist of his own story. The very fact that Marlow is the man telling the story reveals to the reader than he survives his harrowing transformative journey; Marlow learns over the course of his endeavor about the depths of moral depravity involved in the ivory trade, as well as what happens when a man becomes untethered from the social norms that are meant to prevent the colonial forces from acting in an “uncivilized” manner.
In that sense, Marlow is the audience’s placeholder in the text. First published in 1902, like Marlow, the presumably white, Western audience is unfamiliar with life up the Congo River. The extent of what happens away from the watching eye of society is revealed to Marlow and the audience alike, shocking and appalling in equal measure. Despite this dislike of what he sees, Marlow is complicit in the scenes he witnesses. He describes scenes in which African men are beaten and forced into labor. Though he positions himself as the objective storyteller, he is taking a wage from the Company committing these acts. At no point does Marlow make a great gesture of interference; he does not try and halt the horrors of colonialism at the Outer and Central Stations, even though he witnesses and disapproves.
This sense of detachment and weariness is fundamental to Marlow’s character, speaking to his inherent contradictions. He provides searing literary insight into characters yet thinks himself capable of little more than working tough, hard jobs on ships. In many ways, the toughness of his work is a distraction from his own thoughts and his preoccupations with the world around him. He purposefully takes jobs that remove him from society, from people, and from intellectual expectations as a means of escapism and relief.
Kurtz
Like Marlow, Kurtz is a figure who has examined the state of the world around him and disconnected himself. While Marlow works himself relentlessly, trying to distance himself from any moral obligation, Kurtz has entirely abandoned any sense of morality. His role as the antagonist is not a traditional one; he is not a villain in the classic sense. Rather, he represents the (logical) conclusion to the moral abandon of imperialism. He is grandiose, eloquent, and megalomaniacal. For all his charm, he has quite clearly gone insane. After a string of uninteresting and dull bureaucrats, Marlow is clearly fascinated and horrified by Kurtz. Marlow, like the audience, notes that Kurtz is not like the other Company men but is still the embodiment of everything they represent.
For all of Kurtz’s gripping eloquence, there is a quintessential hollowness to the man. After a novel’s worth of journey, bringing Marlow and the audience closer to this distant figure of legend, there is no way in which Kurtz could have measured up to the audience’s expectations. Kurtz is presented as a man of action but spends most of his time in the narrative gaze talking at length. These speeches become Marlow’s insight into the man, contrasting Kurtz’s words with the legend that has been presented to him during the journey up the river.
Ultimately—and inevitably—Kurtz could not be allowed to survive. For the men of the Company, Kurtz has spent too much time with the locals. They have poisoned him—in fact, Kurtz arrived in the jungle already poisoned. Everything Kurtz has done is an extreme extension of the Company’s prior actions in Congo. When the Company men are forced to confront Kurtz’s actions, they are appalled. His fraternizing with the locals, his attempts to make them worship him as a god, and his seeming lack of concern for traditional morals are appalling to them, as they represent the Company’s greatest misdeeds reflected back to them. Kurtz reveals the Company’s hypocrisy; they hate him (and respect and fear him) for doing what they themselves have done. It is ironic, then, that Kurtz is killed by jungle fever; eventually, even Kurtz is taken down by the unknown void.
The Russian Trader
Of all the characters in the novel, the Russian trader is one of the few who nakedly wears his loyalties on his sleeve. Whereas most of the men who work for the Company are ambitious and driven by lust for money, the Russian has abandoned his career to follow Kurtz. He does the bare minimum not to be sued or prosecuted by his company, sending back the occasional shipment of ivory to justify his continued presence in the Congo. His true purpose—as he explains to Marlow—is to be near Kurtz. He is a fanatic, inspired by Kurtz’s rhetoric and ideas. Though the Russian could never accomplish what Kurtz has accomplished, simply being near his hero is enough. Kurtz has expanded the Russian’s mind, and in doing so has inspired fanatical devotion.
The Russian is also a narrative aid, helping to provide exposition for the blank page that is Kurtz’s history. Since arriving in the jungle, the true nature of Kurtz’s actions has been a mystery. The Company is happy that he sends great quantities of ivory and so has—until very recently—been content to ignore the reports and rumors of what Kurtz is doing. The Russian tells Marlow exactly what has happened: Kurtz has inspired a local tribe to consider him a god and has begun raiding towns and taking ivory by force. In the recounting of this, however, the Russian seems unable to ally himself with the locals. He discusses how they consider Kurtz a deity, without acknowledging that he is also a Kurtz evangelical, wildly preaching Kurtz’s merits to Marlow as soon as the steamboat arrives. He discusses the ivory raids, the attack on the steamboat, and Kurtz’s other crimes but assures Marlow that Kurtz cannot be judged for his actions. In every conceivable fashion, the Russian considers Kurtz to be above all other humans, but the lingering traces of racist European colonialism mean that he cannot equate himself to the locals.
The Russian’s identity is also a key factor in the novel’s examination of European identity. Russia is at once European and Other, connecting Europe and Asia together in a cultural and geographic sense. Like the Russian’s patchwork clothes, Russian cultural identity is—to Marlow and the narrative—a sewn-together mix that seems strange and alien. That the Russian is also swept up in the colonialist African enterprise speaks to the far-reaching and domineering effect of European imperialist endeavors.
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