Joseph Conrad's Heart Of Darkness

Was the forest dark? No, it wasn’t just dark. It was gloomy and somber and full of shadows…. I heard they quarreled over hens, but never did I verify that rumor. Details shmetails… Was that how their conversation ensued? I think my memory may be clouding the truth of the scene. Ah well, these gents won’t know the difference… Readers can almost hear Marlow’s skirmish with the story in his head as it simultaneously spills out of his mouth. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness reveals to readers the scene of Marlow and three of his companions aboard the Nellie, a British ship sitting on the River Thames. While sitting aboard the ship, as the evening turns to night, Marlow recounts from his memory the nightmarish journey he took through the African

Marlow himself even acknowledges his insufficient narration. Add to this his limitations as a human being, and it is clear to see that Conrad has pulled Marlow’s strings in such a way as to give an unreliable narration of his story.

Marlow’s story stretches the course of an evening, and through the course of that evening, on more than one occasion, Marlow makes statements which give his listeners reason to distrust his story. “I heard the original quarrel arose from a misunderstanding about some hens. Yes, two black hens. Fresleven—that was the fellow's name, a Dane—thought himself wronged somehow in the bargain, so he went ashore and started to hammer the chief of the village with a stick,” (7) Marlow tells his companions aboard the Nellie. The problem is, Marlow does not know this to be the truth. Miscommunications, falsehoods, and exaggerations are sure to be mixed with the true story before it reaches

He faces human limitations as all other characters in his story face—limitations which a non-character would not have to face. Marlow is forever describing scenes, characters, and objects with an endless string of words, never able to find the exact words which might accurately portray what he has experienced, and omitting background information which would greatly contribute to the understanding of his story. "The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there—there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar" (32). Marlow’s inability to find and define words, here relying upon a word’s antonym to obscurely define its meaning, shows the insufficiency of his narration. He is telling his story orally, without having pre-arranged his thoughts or words, and his story is inexact because of it. He omits biographical information about himself. "Fully fledged characters tend to be fleshed out with personal history, family background, home address; apart from a solitary aunt in Brussels, Marlow has none of these" (Greaney