Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad

THE CHARACTERS

• KURTZ'S MISTRESS
  

  Talking of Kurtz, Marlow says that the wilderness had "loved him, embraced him" (Chapter II), and Conrad gives us a vivid symbol of that embrace in Kurtz's savage mistress. Marlow calls her the soul of the jungle- "wild and, gorgeous," "savage and superb," and like the jungle, dangerous. She seems to be a leader of Kurtz's army; at least, she's the most fearless of his followers, the only one not petrified by the shriek of the steam whistle. As the boat departs, Marlow reports she "stretched tragically her bare arms after us over the sombre and glittering river" (Chapter III); and it's this gesture that reminds Marlow of her when he sees the Intended "put out her arms as if after a retreating figure... across the fading and narrowing sheen of the window" in her drawing room. One woman represents the civilization that loses Kurtz; the other symbolizes the jungle that destroys him.

• THE PILGRIMS
  

  The "pilgrims," as Marlow sarcastically calls them, are the 20 or so agents at the Central Station who carry long staves like actual religious travelers and talk so much about ivory that "You would think they were praying to it." Lazy and self-satisfied, they represent the worst of the whites in Africa: "as to effectually lifting a little finger- oh, no" (Chapter I). At one of the Congo trading stations Conrad visited, he recorded in his diary: "Prominent characteristic of the social life here; people speaking ill of each other." He must have been remembering this behavior when he wrote that the pilgrims "beguiled the time by backbiting and intriguing against each other in a foolish kind of way" (Chapter I). Although he despises them, Conrad uses the pilgrims for comic relief, especially on the trip upriver. (Three or four of them accompany Marlow and the manager.) During the attack, their terror and their wild gunfire are incongruously funny. But the pilgrims are also bloodthirsty; they enjoy massacring Africans. "Don't! don't you frighten them away," they cry when Marlow scares off their human targets with the screech of the steam whistle (Chapter III).

• THE CANNIBALS
  

  On the trip upriver Marlow enlists a crew of about 30 cannibals to do the boat's manual labor. In contrast to the idiotic pilgrims, Conrad portrays the cannibals with dignity. They grow increasingly hungry on board, especially after the pilgrims throw their provision of stinking hippo meat overboard and the manager refuses to stop to trade for food on shore. Marlow tries to imagine why they don't eat him and the pilgrim, and the only answer he can offer is the restraint he values so highly in civilized people: "Restraint! I would just as soon have expected restraint from a hyena prowling amongst the corpses of a battlefield. But there was the fact facing me" (Chapter II). Marlow respects them: "They were men one could work with, and I am grateful to them." Work is one of Marlow's highest values, and the pilgrims, we know, are terrible workers. In fact, the pilgrims are always behaving on a level beneath what you would expect of civilized men, while the cannibals keep acting on a level above what you would expect of savages.

• THE FIREMAN
  

  The fireman is an African who has been trained to operate the boat's vertical boiler. Marlow says, ironically, that through instruction he's an "improved specimen," but he doesn't really understand the machine- he thinks there's an evil spirit inside who gets angry if you don't give him enough water. The fireman is an expression of Conrad's pessimism about civilizing the jungle. It can be done- perhaps- but it will be a long, slow process, much more difficult than all the glib, idealistic talk about "weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways" (Chapter I) takes account of.

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