In Heart of Darkness, both the content and form of Marlow's narrative constantly command attention and undermine language. Recounting his journey to the Congo, Marlow considers the role of the word in the creation of the self and alternates between complete rejection of language and recognition of his own dependence on it. In Marlow's tale, Africans embody an ideal of self-definition through physicality, in contrast to Europeans, whose incessant attempts at linguistic self-expression simply reveal their emptiness. As a result of this examination of the limits of speech and his encounter with Kurtz, a man reduced solely to a voice, Marlow finds himself struggling with his own words as he strives to capture the truth of his experience for his listeners. plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original EssayAlthough from the reader's perspective, Marlow is a rather sedentary figure, who neither moves nor takes any action other than speaking, he claims that he understands himself better because of his work. He explains: “I don't like work that no man does, but I like what there is in work, the possibility of finding oneself, not for others what no man will ever know. They can only see the simple spectacle and can never understand what it really means.” Although Marlow compares himself to all men by noting his aversion to work, he does not understand himself through similarities to others. He sharply contradicts his claims about this bond, because he conceives of himself not as a relational being, finding his unique characteristics through personal interactions, but rather through solitary means, reacting only to the physical world. He does not believe in a shared "reality", but there is only one "for himself" different from the one "for others". For him, individuals can never know anything about each other beyond what we present in a “mere show,” and therefore defining identity by reference to other people is useless. Similarly, the Africans in Marlow's story seem completely defined by their survival in what he sees as an inhospitable environment. Marlow rarely mentions Africans directly, except for the “manager's boy” who is associated with Europeans. Marlow sometimes interprets the meaning behind the Africans' words, but because he does not know their language, he often treats their speech as if it were meaningless or devoid of the meaning system used in English. Instead, Africans' vocalizations simply act as a direct expression of emotions, or of the Congo itself, and are often interspersed with silence. He remembers, for example, hearing the natives from the boat: A cry, a very loud cry, as if of infinite desolation, slowly rang out in the opaque air. It stopped. A plaintive clamor, modulated in ferocious discordances, filled our ears. I don't know how it affected the others: to me it seemed like the fog itself was screaming. It culminated in a hasty explosion of almost intolerably excessive screaming, which stopped abruptly, leaving us frozen in a variety of silly attitudes and listening obstinately to the almost equally appalling and excessive silence. The silence in this passage has the same effect on listeners as voices do, and the degree to which Europeans are uncomfortable hearing silence is evident in their “silly attitudes.” The description interrupts any connection between the sounds and the people who produced them by using passive constructions that elide the subject and reassign the origin to the “fog itself”. Combined with the “excessive” and “infinite” qualities of the sounds, thisdistance from individual speakers denies the possibility of personal expression, so that Marlow perceives Africans as people who avoid the language that provides them with individuality and find themselves in the fog that surrounds them. Instead. One could argue that Africans appear as a mass consciousness without differentiated personalities as a result of Conrad's or Marlow's racism, but regardless of the cause, Conrad certainly portrays this type of externalized speech as a positive trait, shared by Marlow. Like the Africans, Marlow is characterized as speaking from the fog, when the anonymous narrator compares him to other sailors, saying that “for him the meaning of an episode was not within like a kernel but without, enveloping the tale, which brought him out only as a glow brings out a mist, resembling one of these foggy halos” . The voice that emanates from the fog is therefore not dependent on race, but rather on a conception of speech as a reflection of "an episode" or nature, rather than indicative of something within oneself. The Europeans employed by the trading company to remove ivory from Africa are motivated by the desire for self-advancement and, as a result, talk exclusively about themselves. The talkativeness of the men with whom Marlow works becomes ridiculous in contrast to the dominant silence of the Africans and the surrounding forest. Marlow interrupts his memory of a conversation with the brickmaker to describe the vegetation “that stood higher than the wall of a temple, above the great river which I could see through a dark gap glittering, glittering as it flowed widely without a murmur. All this was big, waiting, silent, while man babbled about himself." The quiet dwarfs the speaker, just as vegetation makes man's inventions, like a temple, small and insignificant. Marlow disdains these men for the quantity of their speeches as well as their content: “I let him run, this papier-mâché Mephistopheles, and it seemed to me that if I tried I could stick my forefinger into him and find nothing but a little loose earth, perhaps”. The mason has incorporated nothing of the grandeur of the African landscape into himself, but has only “loose earth.” His words act as a screen for the void, but they are hardly convincing in the silence that surrounds them, since it is in fact while he speaks that Marlow discovers his empty centre. Although Marlow can understand the literal meaning of the Europeans' words, he renders their dialogue meaningless by focusing on its meanness. Reporting the conversation between the director and his uncle, he “picked up bits and pieces” that disapproved of someone, but reduced their words to isolated, and therefore useless, sentences. Despite their shared language, Marlow cannot understand them and receives from what he has heard only the feeling that he likes them very much. This failure of the communicative function of words differs from his experiences with Africans: prehistoric man cursed us, prayed to us, welcomed us: who could say? We were cut off from understanding our surroundings... Yes, it was bad enough, but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you only the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a sneaking suspicion that there's a meaning to it that you... might understand. Marlow appears to interact with his listeners in this passage, responding “yes” to an unspecified challenge, as if he were aware that by admitting a weak understanding, and further response, a sympathy for the speakers who have been called “ugly.” Marlow does not dispute this judgment, but because he associates Africans with the natural world and the past, the phrase “we have been cut off from understanding whatsurrounds us” suggests a sentimental desire to change his identity from European to African, although what really attracts him is the possibility of exchanging flat, selfish words with the mysterious power of language he cannot decipher. Despite his belief in communication across cultural and linguistic barriers (as well as across time periods), Marlow doubts the effectiveness of the word to convey specific meanings. This insecurity manifests itself in the numerous instances in which Marlow interrupts his narrative to question the possibility of a shared understanding between individuals who have only language to bring them together. When he recalls, for example, how he conceived of Kurtz before meeting him, he realizes the futility of trying to convey the essence of any man or experience to his listeners: "Kurtz I didn't see at the time, you understand. He was just a word to me. I didn't see the man in the name any more than you do. Do you see the story? Do you see anything I'm trying to tell? the feeling of the dream. He remained silent for a while. No, it is impossible to convey the feeling of life of a certain era of one's existence: this constitutes its truth, its meaning, its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible We live, as we dream, alone. He paused as if in thought, then added: Of course you guys see more than I could then see me, who you know For a long time he, sitting on the sidelines, was nothing more than a voice." Although the passage begins with a confident statement of. his very intelligibility, i.e. the interjection “you understand,” Marlow's narrative soon breaks down to such an extent that he lapses into ellipses and another voice must intercede to inform the reader of his silence. Paradoxically, even if he considers every explanation of Africa "a vain attempt", he continues to look for words that express that inability to communicate; he cannot find any silence deep enough and instead multiplies his sentences until they overflow. He speaks of “dream-feeling,” “life-feeling,” “truth,” “meaning,” and “essence” to describe what he cannot describe, for none of these terms could adequately convey their absence, but as words of Europeans, their volume takes on the function of silence, while it depends on words. Marlow explicitly attacks the tendency of words and names to replace their referents and favors the act of seeing over hearing, as when he says: “I did not see… it was only a word to me”. Vision presupposes direct physical contact with the object, while hearing is based on another person's presumably different impression and choice of words, which in themselves can be misleading, as when he notes that while the name of Kurtz means "low", the man himself was not . Marlow finally resumes his tale after assuring himself: “Of course you boys see more in this than I could then. You see me, who you know...” The other narrator, however, undermines this point by informing us that Marlow is actually invisible and has become just a voice, like Kurtz. Listeners can see neither themselves nor the speaker, and therefore depend on the word for any mutual contact, but the intense loneliness of the phrase "We live, as we dream - alone" indicates that relating dreams, or the most personal of thoughts, cannot overcome the extreme isolation of souls. Kurtz's madness stems from his isolation. Given that he had based his identity on voice, even in Europe, as the journalist visiting Marlow tells us, in the absence of such a, 1967.