About the Director of Companies (Nellie): He resembled a pilot, which to a seaman is trustworthiness personified.

The sea bonded us sailors. The long periods at sea, separated from everyone else, brought us closer together and made us tolerant of each other’s stories and beliefs. 

About the sky above the Nellie: The water shone pacifically; the sky, without a speck, was a benign immensity of unstained light;

The narrator glorifies the use of the river in history. “What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth!... The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.”

At one time even Britain was the very end of the world. The fascination of the abomination. Is Marlow trying to describe his own state/experiences by correlating himself to the hypothetical Roman soldier he speaks of? “They were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect. They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force—nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others” This sums up Marlow’s opinion about the british empire post his travels. The only good thing is the idea behind it.

Fresleven (a Dane) was killed in a fight over two hens. Nobody picked up his body! The natives believed that white men had magical powers.

They were going to run an over-sea empire, and make no end of coin by trade.= Shows the reader that the most lucrative purpose of taking over the country was actually profit.

Marlow:

seaman and wanderer according to the narrator. More of a sailor than anyone else aboard the Nellie. To him, the meaning of a story was not like a nut that could be easily removed from its shell. To Marlow, the point of a story was the shell itself—the narration. And just like light will reveal the haze, storytelling will bring things to light that you might not have seen otherwise.

Crossed his legs, looked like a Buddha in European clothes.

By telling his story and emphasizing the importance of it being told, Marlow makes a point, i.e. the problem cannot be understood till it is lived or experienced, directly or indirectly.

It was very fine for a time, but after a bit I did get tired of resting.

By the time he grew up, Africa was no longer a blank space on the map. It had become a place of darkness.

“But there was in it one river especially, a mighty big river, that you could see on the map, resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land. And as I looked at the map of it in a shop-window, it fascinated me as a snake would a bird—a silly little bird.”“The snake had charmed me”

here was a vast amount of red (British colonies)—good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there, a deuce of a lot of blue (French), a little green (Italian), smears of orange (Portugese), and, on the East Coast, a purple patch (German East Africa), to show where the jolly pioneers of progress drink the jolly lager-beer. However, I wasn’t going into any of these. I was going into the yellow. Dead in the centre. And the river was there—fascinating—deadly—like a snake. 

Then—would you believe it?—I tried the women (Shows a rather condescending view of women). Compares the thin woman (out of the two sitting in the Company’s office, knitting) to a sleepwalker. “It’s weird how out of touch with truth women are. They live in their own world, and there has never been anything like it, and never can be. It’s too beautiful to be real, and if they tried to make it happen it would fall apart before the first sunset. Some well-known fact that we men have been living with since the beginning of time would come and knock the whole thing over.”

 The older one sat on her chair. Her flat cloth slippers were propped up on a foot-warmer and she a cat was laying in her lap. She wore some starched white thing on her head, had a wart on one cheek, and silver-rimmed glasses hung on the tip of her nose. She glanced at me above the glasses.

Often far away there I thought of these two, guarding the door of darkness, knitting black wool as for a warm pall, one introducing, introducing continuously to the unknown, the other scrutinizing the cheery and foolish faces with unconcerned old eyes. Ave! Old knitter of black wool. Morituri te salutant. Not many of those she looked at ever saw her again—not half, by a long way

Marlow meets a young man at the doctor’s office and when he continues to praise the Company’s work, Marlow asks him why he wouldn’t go there himself. He says:  ‘I am not such a fool as I look, quoth Plato to his disciples,

The doctor is the second person to make a reference to people never returning from The Congo. 1- Marlow when he speaks about the many men the two women would have seen just once.

The doctor believes that a study of the human psyche is a treasure he must take from the work in the Congo. Though marlow claims not to be a typical English gentleman, the doctor says he might just be wrong although the statement is profound. Asks him to Keep Calm.

The aunt got carried away with the popular propaganda supporting the white man’s burden. She talked about ‘weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways,’ till, upon my word, she made me quite uncomfortable. I ventured to hint that the Company was run for profit. “‘You forget, dear Charlie, that the labourer is worthy of his hire,’ she said, brightly. Even when he asked the fat white man why he had come there if he couldn’t handle the pressures, the man said- to make money, ofcourse! That man wanted to have one of the porters killed to set an example.

IMPORTANT: The sound of the waves was comforting, like the voice of a brother. It was something natural and meaningful. Now and then a boat from the shore brought me back in touch with reality. It was being paddled by black fellows. You could see the whites of their eyes glistening from far away. They shouted and sang, and their bodies dripped with sweat. They had faces like bizarre masks, but they had a natural energy and life, like the sea itself. Their presence didn’t need to be explained. They were very comforting to look at. For a while I would feel that the world made sense and was full of straightforward facts.

About the ship he saw firing into nothingness:  It was pointless and impossible to understand. The guns would pop, a small flame would appear from their barrels, a little white smoke would puff out, and nothing would happen. Nothing could happen. It was insane, and it only seemed more insane when someone swore to me that there was a camp of natives (or ‘enemies,’ as he called them) hidden in the jungle.

En route, he saw that the only things happening were trade and death.

Well, if a lot of mysterious niggers armed with all kinds of fearful weapons suddenly took to travelling on the road between Deal and Gravesend, catching the yokels right and left to carry heavy loads for them, I fancy every farm and cottage thereabouts would get empty very soon. 

Conversation with the Swede is important: he looks on to the outpost with disgust. When Marlow asks why a man hung himself, the Swede says: ‘Who knows? The sun too much for him, or the country perhaps

“This objectless blasting was all the work going on”. From the moment Marlow reaches, he sees pointless activities being carried out.

Sees extremely thin black men walking together, chained. They were called criminals not enemies. The black soldier stands up straight when he sees Marlow. This shows us how to black people, the whites all look the same. Just as the whites claim that the blacks do.

He stepped aside a huge hole that had been dug for no apparent reason. Went into a deep trench where walking under the trees made him feel like he was stepping into a dark hell. Nothing moved, but the sound of the rushing rapids was all around. It sounded as though the earth was tearing apart. This was where the workers went to die. They were not enemies or criminals. They weren’t even humans anymore.

Marlow gave one of them a biscuit. This man had a white cloth tied around his neck, the purpose of which Marlow couldn’t understand.

There were two more dying men nearby. One sat with his chin on his knees, staring at nothing. The other man was resting his head like he was worn out. All around them were the bodies of other workers who had collapsed. It looked like a massacre or a plague. I was horrified. One of the men crawled on all fours down to the river to drink. He lapped the water from his hand, then sat up and slumped over in the sunlight.

Chief Accountant: His clothes were clean and white and his boots were shined. He wasn’t wearing a hat and his hair was slicked down. He carried an umbrella to protect himself from the sun. He had a pen behind his ear.  ‘He said that he had stepped outside ‘to get a breath of fresh air.’ That was a weird thing for someone in the jungle to say, like he was an ordinary office-worker. I wouldn’t mention him except he was the one who first told me about the man who looms over all of my memories. Also, I respected the man. Yes, I respected his sharp clothes and his neat hair. He looked like a mannequin, but at least he managed to take care of himself in that awful place. That takes backbone. His fancy clothes were a sign of his character. He’d been out here for three years and I couldn’t help asking him how he kept his clothes so nice. He blushed and said, ‘I taught one of the native women to clean them. It was hard. She didn’t like

doing it.’ This was quite an accomplishment. Also, he kept the Company’s books in very good order.  The accountant became mildly annoyed any time a sick agent from somewhere in the jungle was brought to the station and put on a cot in his office. ‘The groans of this sick person are distracting,’ he said. ‘It’s very hard to keep from making mistakes in my books in this climate.’’ He asked Marlow to take a message to Kurtz (everything is fine here) as he didn’t like to write to Kurtz for the fear of his correspondence landing into the wrong hands.

Marlow spent a lot of time in his office in order to get some relief from the mess he saw around himself otherwise. There happened to be lots of flies there and it was poorly constructed.

The manager: “My first conversation with the manager was strange. He didn’t ask me to sit down, even though I’d walked twenty miles that day alone. He was average looking in his complexion, feature, manner, voice, and size. Maybe his blue eyes were a bit cold, and they could fall on you with the weight of an axe. But everything else about him was mild-mannered. He had a weird sort of half-smile, like he knew a secret. It’s hard to describe. He didn’t do it consciously, but it was most obvious at the end of anything he said. It made even ordinary statements seem mysterious. He’d been a trader here his whole life. The men obeyed him, but they didn’t respect or fear him. He made everyone feel uneasy. Not outright distrust, just uneasiness. You have no idea how effective such a power can be. He wasn’t very organized, which you could see by looking around the station. He wasn’t smart or educated. How did he get that job? Maybe because he never got sick. He’d served three terms of three years each out there. Staying healthy in the midst of so much sickness was a special power. When he went on leave, he partied wildly, like a sailor on shore. But he was similar to a sailor only on the outside. You could tell this simply by listening to him talk. He didn’t bring anything new into the world, but he kept things going. He was a great man because it was impossible to tell what motivated him. He never gave that secret away. Perhaps he had nothing in his heart at all. That thought was scary, because there was no one out there to stop him from doing whatever he wanted. Once when almost all of the other white agents at the station were sick with some tropical disease, he said, ‘Men should only come out here if they don’t have anything inside.’ He smiled that weird half-smile of his, which was like a door cracking open in a dark room. You thought you’d seen something in him, but it closed too quickly. The white men kept arguing over who got to sit where during mealtimes, so he had a big round table built. Wherever he sat was the head of the table. None of the other seats mattered. There was no arguing with him about this. He wasn’t friendly or unfriendly. He was quiet. He had a young, plump black servant from the coast, whom he allowed, even in his presence, to provoke the white men

The white agents don’t really do anything in the central station. The word ‘ivory’ rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse. 

Man trying to put out a fire with a bucket that had a hole in it. Important.

Brickmaker:  He was a young agent with a forked beard and a hooked nose. He was cold to the other agents, who thought he was the manager’s spy. I’d hardly spoken to him before. We started talking and strolled away from the fire. He asked me to come back to his room in the main building of the station. He lit a match and I saw that this young aristocrat had nice furniture and a whole candle all to himself. At that time, the manager was supposed to be the only person with candles. There were native mats hanging on the walls, as well as spears, shields, and knives. They were like hunting trophies. This man’s job was making bricks, but there weren’t any bricks anywhere in the station. He’d been there a year, waiting for all of the materials to arrive that he needed to make bricks. Since whatever the material was couldn’t be

found in the country and wasn’t on its way from Europe, I didn’t know why he bothered to keep waiting. Maybe he thought the material would simply appear out of thin air. But it seemed like all of the agents were waiting for something.

“He reminded me of a paper doll of the devil—if I poked him, there would be nothing inside but a little dirt. You see, he wanted to be the assistant to the current manager”

Marlow noticed a small painting on the wall of a blindfolded woman carrying a torch. The background was almost black. She looked grand but her face was sinister. He was told that Kurtz had painted it.

The white men always carried sticks with them. Almost as if they slept with them. Important.

 I wouldn’t have fought about Kurtz, but I did lie for his sake. I hate lies, not because I’m a more honest than everyone else, but because lies are like death to me. Lying makes me feel sick, like I’m biting into something rotten. But I more or less lied by letting the brickmaker believe that I had a lot of influence back in Europe. By lying I became the same as all of those false men at the station. But I lied because I thought it would somehow help Kurtz, even though the man was just a name to me. I couldn’t see the man through the name any more than you can. Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It feels like I’m trying to tell you about a dream. It’s impossible to convey the essence of a dream. There’s no way to express the sensation of strangeness and surprise that a dream causes. . .”

The bricklayer told me that he wasn’t afraid of God or the devil, let alone some man. I said I could see that, but what I wanted were rivets and Mr. Kurtz would also want rivets, if he knew the situation. I demanded rivets and argued that there must be some way for an intelligent man to get them. This made him get very standoffish. He started talking about a hippopotamus that lived in the river nearby. He asked whether it bothered me when I slept on my boat at night (I was always at the boat). This old hippo would wander around the station at night while the white men shot at him. It was a waste of time. ‘That animal has a charmed life,’ he said. ‘But only beasts have charmed lives here. Men can’t.’