Why?

Now that we have reached the end of Marlow's tale, why did he even bother telling it?

At the very beginning, the ship is heading out of London. It is getting dark. The narrator says something very interesting, "Hunters for gold or pursuers of mame, the all had gone out gon that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire" (5). He's talking about imperialism, which just so happens to be one major issue in Marlow's story.

When Marlow finishes the story, even though there is only one paragraph from our narrator, we can tell that he is already changed. Instead of praising those who have gone out into the world to spread the British culture before them, he describes the scene in front of them, what they are heading towards, as, "leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky--it seemed to lead into the heart of immense darkness" (117). That sure didn't sound like his praising self before.

I think the point of Marlow's telling of his story is that it still haunts him. Also, he feels compelled to share the dark truth with the ones who are out to continue it. Perhaps that is Conrad's point of writing this book, too. Do you agree or do you have other ideas?

Comments

[Meghan W.]

I completely agree with this. Marlow realizes that not telling the truth to the "Intended" still haunts him. To back Marlow up, I don't think I would have told the Intended what Kurtz's real last words either, but that really ended up hurting Marlow. The whole book Marlow talks about darkness, it is even mentioned in the title of the book. I think he talks about how dark and light things are to show how those certain things affect him as a person. I think Marlow tells this story to feel better about himself, in the sense that this was all bottled up inside and he needed to let it out.

[anon]

I think the point is that Marlow is presented as an ironised narrator (I use that in the sense that he is compelled to tell the story, he makes sense of himself in its telling). We are told at the beginning that Marlow tells a lot of tales, and this narrative therefore seems iterative (i.e. the fiction of the tale being re-told).

Ideas of selfhood in Conrad seem generally socially constructed (i.e. Nostromo who exists in his socially given name, Capitaz, and in the loss of the that name loses his identity). Consequently, I think the act of telling for Marlow (as for the language teacher in Under Western Eyes) is an act of self re-presentation.

I also think, that it is not a 'dark truth' that Marlow is compelled to tell, but the absence of that very truth. He spends the entire novel anticipating Kurtz only to be left with the words 'the horror, the horror'. His search for a 'truth' reveals only an empty darkness, like the blank centre to the map of the Africa at the beginning.

I also think that the frame narrator changes precisely to indicate the elision of voices in the novel. Certainly, even from the start the frame narrator sets up the apparently proleptic darkness of 'Graveshead' and the gloom over the Thames, everything is quite foreboding. It is therefore not surprising when Marlow interrupts, 'And this also... has been one the dark places of the earth'.

In HD I think Conrad just takes the polyphonic narrative voices of the Nigger of the Narcissus (with its emergence of the personal pronoun 'I' in the final paragraph) much much further.