Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad

THE CHARACTERS

• THE RUSSIAN
  

  When Marlow finally arrives at Kurtz's Inner Station, he encounters a young Russian sailor whose outfit is so colorfully patched that he reminds Marlow of a harlequin, the traditional Italian clown who dresses in motley. And he's as simple-minded and almost as ridiculous as a clown- a startling instance of innocence in the midst of depravity, and a peculiar contrast to Kurtz. (He also serves as a plot device, filling us in on details about Kurtz we need to know.) Though he is "Kurtz's last disciple" and apparently even witnessed the "unspeakable rites" Kurtz participated in, he's too childlike to have taken part himself. Marlow even admires his adventurous spirit, though he disapproves of his devotion to Kurtz.

  But even his devotion makes him sympathetic. He nursed Kurtz through two serious illnesses without medical supplies, and he received little gratitude in return. (Kurtz even threatened to shoot him to get his small hoard of ivory.) In addition to loyalty, his character is marked by "the glamour of youth" and "the absolutely pure, uncalculating, unpractical spirit of adventure." He has wandered the jungles for two years, mostly alone; and he makes his exit headed for more lonely wanderings. He is full of self-doubt, he has no great thoughts and no abilities, he tells Marlow. No wonder such an impressionable youth is mesmerized by "Kurtz's magnificent eloquence."

  But the Russian sailor is also a fool. Marlow tells us that a fool is safe from madness in the jungle: you can be "too dull even to know you are being assaulted by the powers of darkness" (Chapter II). The Russian is so awed by Kurtz's ideas ("That man has enlarged my mind," he exclaims) that he becomes morally blind to the evil Kurtz does. Yet he is not malicious himself; in fact, he's one of the very few whites along the Congo who isn't a scoundrel. So it's appropriate that he doesn't work for the odious Company. (His free-agent status, in fact, is what makes the manager want to hang him.)

• THE MANAGER
  

  If Heart of Darkness has a villain, it's the manager of the Company's Central Station, who accompanies Marlow on the steamboat to the Inner Station. But he's a villain in a rather general sense, standing in Marlow's eyes for all the bloodless bureaucrats who calmly oversee the Company's mass enslavement of the Africans. He has no moral sensibility, just a business sensibility: Kurtz's foulest crimes are, to his mind, "deplorable" only because "the trade will suffer" on account of them (Chapter III).

  The manager is a talentless nobody with no special abilities. His Central Station is a chaotic mess. The only claim he has to his position is his hardy constitution: he doesn't catch the tropical diseases that overwhelm other whites (including Kurtz and Marlow). That gives him staying power.

  Practically the first thing Marlow says about the manager is, "He was commonplace in complexion, in feature, in manners, and in voice" (Chapter I); and the long description that follows emphasizes his commonness. In this he is certainly the opposite of his rival, Kurtz, of whom Marlow remarks, "Whatever he was, he was not common" (Chapter II). He resents Kurtz so much that he seems to be willing to let the trade suffer by sabotaging him. Marlow hints that he intentionally sank the steamer so that Kurtz, already ill, would die before help reached the Inner Station.

  So his blandness conceals a deeper malignancy, which becomes most apparent as he watches Kurtz's slow death with satisfaction: "the 'affair' had come off as well as could be wished" (Chapter III). He half-starves the boat's African crew by refusing to stop to let them trade for food on shore. (He has plenty of his own.)

  Unlike Kurtz, he can exercise restraint: "He was just the kind of man who would wish to preserve appearances. That was his restraint" (Chapter II). He cares a lot more about the appearance of being an upright manager than about the actual wrongs he commits. His crimes have the approval of society- most of them just involve carrying on the business of the big bureaucratic death-machine known as the Company.

  Incidentally, the manager is based on the real-life Camille Delcommune, manager of a Congo trading station at which Conrad was stationed in much the same capacity as Marlow. He wrote to his aunt (September 26, 1890): "The manager is a common ivory-dealer with sordid instincts who considers himself a merchant though he is only a kind of African shop-keeper. His name is Delcommune.... I can hope for neither promotion nor increase of salary while he remains here." The dislike was mutual, so we can be sure that the portrait of the rotten manager is at least partly an act of revenge.

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