The River on the Board
Full spoilers, the ending included, for Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. A sailor named Marlow tells four men on a boat how he went up a great river in Africa to find a Company agent named Kurtz. The book is short and hard, so I want to give you a way to hold it.
Here is mine. In my reading, this is a story about a ledger. At every stop on the river someone is keeping count, and what gets counted is ivory. People do not get counted. I read the whole novella and tallied words by part, and I will show you where the numbers jump.
One warning. The book is full of cruel racist language, and it hardly lets African people speak. I leave every slur out and keep this summary non-graphic. The text is Project Gutenberg ebook number two hundred nineteen.
Five Men on the Nellie
The story opens on the Thames. A small yacht, the Nellie, waits at anchor for the tide to turn. Aboard are the Director of Companies, a Lawyer, an Accountant, Marlow, and an unnamed narrator who tells us everything that is not Marlow talking. The Accountant is busy with a box of dominoes. Remember him.
As the sun goes down, Marlow says this river, too, has been one of the dark places of the earth. He means the time when the Romans first came. Then he turns to his own trip, and from there the book is one man talking in the dark.
My count says the opening on the river runs about twenty-one hundred words, Romans included. The closing, after Marlow stops, takes seventy-four. In between, the text is about thirty-nine thousand words in three parts. Part one is fourteen thousand six hundred eighty-four. Part two is twelve thousand four hundred fifty-six. Part three is twelve thousand thirty-one.
Stop One: The Company’s Station
Before the river there is an office. Marlow signs a contract in a city he compares to a whited sepulchre, past two women knitting black wool. On the wall is a map in many colors, and he is going into the yellow, dead in the centre. A doctor measures his head and says the changes take place inside.
Then come thirty days by sea, past a warship shelling the bush. Then thirty miles by steamer to the Company’s station, by the first rapids. Marlow sees six men in iron collars, joined by a chain, carrying baskets of earth. In a grove nearby, workers who can no longer work have crawled away to die. He gives one a ship’s biscuit.
Then he meets the chief accountant. White suit, starched collar, a pen behind his ear. The groans of a sick man bother him, because they cause clerical errors. Marlow calls his books in apple-pie order. Here is the first entry in my ledger. The books are correct. The dying are not in them.
The accountant is also the first to say the name Kurtz. He sends in as much ivory as all the others together. By my count the name first appears about eight thousand one hundred words in, a fifth of the way through.
Stop Two: The Central Station
Marlow walks two hundred miles with a caravan of sixty men and reaches the Central Station on the fifteenth day. His steamboat is at the bottom of the river. The manager inspires only uneasiness, and says the repairs will take three months. He turns out to be right.
Everyone here waits. A shed of trade goods burns, and a man runs for water with a pail that has a hole in it. The brickmaker has no bricks to show after more than a year. They all want a post where ivory is bought, because there is a percentage in it.
What Marlow wants is rivets. The word rivets appears sixteen times in part one, and never again. There are cases of them down at the coast, burst and split. None reach him. What arrives instead is the Eldorado Exploring Expedition, led by the manager’s uncle. It marches into the wilderness, and later the news comes that every donkey is dead.
This is the ledger at its plainest. Cheap cotton and beads go up the river, ivory comes down, and the one small thing a boat needs never comes.
Up the River
Part two starts with an overheard talk. Lying on his deck, Marlow hears the manager and his uncle fret about Kurtz, who sends ivory and wants no help. The uncle says the climate may solve the problem. Marlow grows eager to meet Kurtz.
It takes two months to reach him. Marlow carries the manager, a few agents they call pilgrims, and a crew of about thirty African men. Their pay is three pieces of brass wire a week, to buy food in villages that are empty or hostile. The pilgrims throw the crew’s rotten hippo meat overboard.
On the bank Marlow finds a note that says, wood for you, hurry up, approach cautiously. He also finds a battered book on seamanship. Then a fog comes down, a cry rises, and arrows follow. Marlow’s helmsman is killed by a spear. Marlow throws the body overboard, and the steam whistle drives the attackers off.
In my reading, this part is the river itself. The word snag appears eleven times in part two and nowhere else. Fog appears eight times, against one in part one and none in part three. Marlow calls the attack an attempt at repulse.
Stop Three: The Inner Station
At the Inner Station a young man in a patched harlequin coat waves from the shore. He is a Russian, about twenty-five, who has wandered the river for nearly two years. He says Kurtz enlarged his mind, and Marlow gives back his seamanship book.
Through his glasses Marlow sees that the round knobs on the posts around the house are human heads. Kurtz is carried out on a stretcher, thin, with a huge voice. A woman in bright cloths and brass walks the shore and lifts her arms. The Russian says Kurtz ordered the attack on the steamer, to scare Marlow away.
The manager calls Kurtz’s methods unsound, because they hurt the Company’s trade. Marlow answers that there was no method at all. That night Kurtz crawls out of his cabin toward the fires. Marlow cuts him off, tells him he will be lost, utterly lost, and helps him back.
The person the river has been building is Kurtz. By my count the name appears twenty-one times in part one, thirty-five in part two, and sixty-five in part three.
Down the River
The steamer starts back, and Marlow blows the whistle to scatter the crowd on the bank. Kurtz talks of his Intended, his station, his career. When the boat breaks down, he hands Marlow a packet of papers and a photograph.
Kurtz says he is lying in the dark waiting for death. Then comes the cry that gives the novella its fame. The horror, the horror. A servant says Mister Kurtz is dead. The pilgrims bury something in a muddy hole the next day, and Marlow nearly follows, sick for a long time.
Marlow calls Kurtz remarkable, because he had something to say, and he said it. I count the word horror eight times in the whole text. Seven are in part three, and every one is about that cry. The word voice appears forty-two times, eight in part one, sixteen in part two, and eighteen in part three.
The Intended
Marlow returns to the city that looks like a tomb. Men come for the papers. One in gold spectacles wants documents for the Company. A cousin says Kurtz was a musician. A journalist says he belonged in politics. Nobody agrees who he was.
Marlow carries a portrait and some letters to the girl in black, Kurtz’s Intended. She asks for his last words, something to live with. Marlow says the last word was her name. She cries out in triumph, and he says he could not tell her the truth, because it would have been too dark.
That is the lie. Earlier Marlow said he hates a lie, that there is a taint of death in it. At the end he tells one, to protect her belief.
The book closes on the Thames. The Director says they have lost the first of the ebb, and the waterway seems to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.
The Counts, Part by Part
Now the table. Dark and darkness together appear fifty times, fifteen in part one, ten in part two, and twenty-five in part three. That is about two per thousand words in the last part, and one in the other two.
Ivory appears thirty times. Five in part one, twelve in part two, thirteen in part three. Part one is paper, with sixteen rivets and a ledger. Part two is the river, with snags and fog. Part three is a person, and his name.
The title phrase, heart of darkness, appears exactly twice, once in part two and once in part three. Both times it is about the river, not about Kurtz.
In My Reading
These are my readings, so treat them as opinions. The horror is not only what Kurtz did. It is how long the ledger keeps balancing while everyone looks away. And Marlow sees the cruelty, then tells the lie that keeps the story polite.
You should also know the book’s hardest criticism. In nineteen seventy-five the writer Chinua Achebe gave a lecture, later titled An Image of Africa, arguing that Conrad was a racist. He said the book treats Africa as a place of darkness for Europeans to cross and does not give African people their full humanity. That is reported by several outlets, and I recommend reading his essay after the novella.
Is it worth reading? In my view yes, once, with that argument beside it. It takes under three hours and it is free on Project Gutenberg.
Where the River Ends
Heart of Darkness is a short trip with a stop on every page. A river, a ledger, a voice, and one lie at the end. If this helped, subscribe, tap like, and tell me in the comments which stop on the river stayed with you. The full guide with the counts is at book explained dot com.
