Summary
One evening Marlow eavesdropped on the Manager and his uncle as they discussed Kurtz. Marlow learned that Kurtz asked the Company's Administration to send him into the jungle to show how much ivory he could acquire, and that he sent his assistant back to the Manager because he found him inadequate for the work. Marlow further learned that there were "strange rumours" circulating about Kurtz's behavior. The Manager insinuated that he hoped Kurtz would die in the jungle. A few days later, the Eldorado Expedition entered the jungle; they had no news except that all the donkeys were dead. His steamboat repaired, Marlow began his voyage to the Inner Station, accompanied by the Manager, the other agents whom Marlow calls "pilgrims," and 20 natives (who were also cannibals).
About fifty miles below the Inner Station, the steamboat came across a hut of reeds; near the hut were the remnants of a flag and a neatly stacked woodpile. Near the woodpile, written on a board, were the words, "Wood for you. Hurry up. Approach cautiously." Inside the hut, Marlow found evidence of a White tenant: a rudely formed table, a heap of rubbish, and a book about seamanship with some sort of code written in the margins. The natives took the wood (to power the steamboat) and Marlow slipped the book in his pocket.
When they were about a mile and a half below the Inner Station, unseen, silent natives who fired small arrows attacked the steamboat. The pilgrims fired their guns into the bush while the attack continued, the helmsman soon being killed by a spear.
Finally, Marlow reached the Inner Station. He first saw a "long, decaying building" with a number of posts around it; each post was topped with a "round curved ball." (Later, Marlow discovered that the building was Kurtz's quarters and that the "balls" were human heads.) A White man met them at the shore and reminded Marlow of a harlequin; he informed them that Kurtz was still alive. The Harlequin then explained that the natives attacked Marlow's steamboat because they did not want anyone to take Kurtz away from them.
Analysis
Part 2 of Heart of Darkness offers the reader some of Conrad's most dense passages. Sentences such as "It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention" may seem confusing, but the difficulty here instead is Marlow's, because much of Heart of Darkness concerns how its protagonist struggles to articulate what traveling through the jungle is like. Marlow explains to his companions on the Nellie that they cannot fully grasp the whole truth of what he saw, because they live in the modern, "civilized" world with "a butcher round one corner, a policeman round another, excellent appetites, and temperature normal." Marlow's point here is that language sometimes fails to wholly convey the wonders and horrors of his experience; his remark, "This is the worst of trying to tell," suggests his difficulty in relating to his companions the full emotional, spiritual, and political impact that his journey had on him. His companions will not be able to fully understand him because they live with the "solid pavement" of Europe under their feet. This idea that Marlow's telling of the story is a major part of the story itself is suggested by the anonymous narrator who, at the beginning of the novel, explains that, for Marlow, "the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze." In other words, Heart of Darkness is as much the story of a man coming face-to-face with a number of political, moral, and spiritual horrors as much as it is one of that same man's search for language adequate enough to convey them. Hence, the novel is by turns both striking and obtuse, both concrete and abstract, both detailed and ambiguous.
Note that Marlow pauses at one point in Part 2 and the flow of his story is broken by the frame narrator's words. This reminds the reader of the fact that Marlow is telling his story instead of living through it — and that what he knows about the story's issues as a whole will affect the ways he relates it to the men on the Nellie. There are essentially two Marlows: The one who lived through the experience and the one who looks back on it. Marlow's digression about Kurtz, therefore, allows the reader to eventually meet Kurtz with Marlow's opinions of him in mind.
In Part 1, Marlow calls the forest "primeval" and jokes that he expected to see an "ichthyosaurus" while voyaging through it. Throughout Part 2, Marlow's description of the jungle is marked by an increased emphasis on what he sees as its prehistoric nature. "Going back to that jungle was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world," he states, and subsequent passages reinforce this impression. For example, he calls himself and his crew "wanderers on a prehistoric earth" and the natives examples of "prehistoric man." Marlow also stresses the unreality of the jungle that can make one "bewitched" and cut off from everything one had ever known. The tiny steamboat, "clinging to the skirts of the unknown," causes Marlow to feel small and lost.
This attitude may seem patronizing — as if Marlow implies that Africa is unfinished and is ages behind Europe in terms of civilization. However, much of Conrad's novel is a critique of civilization and those who want (like Kurtz) to bring its "light" into the heart of "darkness." Similarly, modern readers may regard where Marlow discusses his connections to the natives as Eurocentric or even racist.
To a European in 1899, the thought of one's kinship with "savages" may, indeed, seem "ugly" — but Marlow's point here is that only someone with the necessary courage could see that the differences between "enlightened" Europe and the "prehistoric" Congo are superficial ones. This is one of the things that Marlow learns from Kurtz and that is stressed when, during the attack on the steamboat, Marlow sees "a face amongst the leaves on the level with my own, looking at me very fierce and steady." The Company may bring no real "light" to Africa, but Marlow is increasingly "enlightened" about his own humanity.
Still, Marlow is not yet the Buddha preaching in European clothes he will become on board the Nellie. Instead, he concentrates on steering the steamboat and avoiding snags to save his mind from considering all of these philosophical and political implications. Focusing on "work" instead of deeper moral concerns is what saves Marlow's sanity — and by extension, allows the Company to ravage the Congo without a moment's pause. Piloting is the "rivet" that holds together Marlow as he comes closer to Kurtz, who will upset all of Marlow's "surface-truths" (as he calls them) and force him to consider all the ugliness of which Marlow has been a part.
Marlow does speak well of the cannibals on board his steamboat, for they possess a quality that Marlow sees less and less during his time in Company-controlled Africa: restraint. Although these men "still belonged to the beginnings of time," they never attack their White superiors — which would have been an easy feat for them. Marlow argues that "the devilry of lingering starvation" is the most impossible force to defeat, because it outweighs any "superstitions, beliefs, and what you may call principles." Unlike the Company (and its greatest prodigy, Kurtz), the "savage" Africans show a humane and honorable restraint that their "superiors" obviously lack, as seen in their insatiable hunger for ivory and the brutal means by which they acquire it.
As the jungle grows more frightening and mysterious, Marlow struggles to keep himself calm and "European." His joy in finding the Harlequin's book reflects his longing for a sign of his previous world as he trudges through this new one. Despite the fact that the book itself (An Inquiry into Some Points of Seamanship) looks "dreary reading enough," Marlow is excited by its very existence as "something unmistakably real." The book's subject matter and author (a "Master in His Majesty's Navy"), while dry, are evidence of "science" and "an honest concern for the right way of going to work." When he is summoned to the steamboat, Marlow confesses that putting down the book is like "tearing myself away from the shelter of an old and solid friendship"; the "friendship" of which Marlow speaks is his long one with Europe, which has always kept him "sheltered" from the truth of his kinship with "savagery."
The death of the helmsman is another scene where Marlow attempts to make the reality of his situation "fade." After finding that the helmsman has been killed in the attack, Marlow is "morbidly anxious" to change his shoes and socks.
In addition to intensifying the reader's understanding of Marlow's impending epiphany, Part 2 contains a digression where he abandons his narrative and speaks of Kurtz in a general sense. Unlike the cannibals, Kurtz possessed a ravenous hunger: "You should have heard him say . . . 'My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my — ' everything." His bald head suggested the ivory that he had spent so much effort in securing. His "nerves went wrong" and he participated in "unspeakable rites." He "had taken a high seat among the devils of the land" and Marlow found it impossible to know "how many powers of darkness had claimed him for their own." However, what is more striking than these elusive hints at barbarity is Marlow's short yet important defense of Kurtz: "All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz." Literally, Marlow is speaking of Kurtz's ancestry — but metaphorically, Marlow implies that the horrors he saw in Africa cannot all be blamed on one man. More importantly, Kurtz is not an isolated figure — all of Europe has produced him, and the power, hunger, and evil he embodies. The appearance of the Harlequin (like Kurtz's jester) at this point emphasizes the charisma and power of the demagogue and prepares the reader — like the previously discussed digression — for the entrance of Kurtz in Part 3.
Glossary
Winchesters a type of magazine rifle, first made in the 1860s.
sounding-pole a pole used to determine the depth of a body of water.
scow a large, flat-bottomed boat with square ends, used for carrying coal, sand, and so on and often towed by a tug.
Martini-Henry a military rifle.
fusillade a simultaneous or rapid and continuous discharge of many firearms.
