To be genuinely honest, I am still having trouble understanding this story to its fullest extent. There are so many descriptive words being used that it gets to the point where I can no longer fully comprehend what it is that is being described, and when I come across a word I am having trouble understanding, I cannot use context clues because the context the word is used in is chock full of so many seemingly unnecessary adjectives that I become even more confused. However, I did manage to get some pretty good ties to Dante's Inferno out of this portion of Chapter One, so let us go discuss that instead of my continual epic fail.
I am simply going to list them. (1) The accountant-type person is so focused on his work that even the quiet moans of a sick man across the room are a bother to him, so it could be that in the Inferno, his punishment would be that he would be surrounded by constant white noise that prevents him from accomplishing anything. (2) When the accountant-man is explaining to Marlow where he can find Kurtz, he says "..at the bottom there.." (page 16), which could be an allusion to the fact that Lucifer was located in the circle of the Inferno that was all the way at the bottom/the center of the earth. (3) The people waiting to make the bricks appear to me to be the people who are trapped in Limbo, simply waiting and waiting for something that could very well never happen.
I did locate allusions to things other than the Inferno in this section of chapter one. The main thing that I picked up on was the themes of segregation from the company employees in Europe, to the company workers in Africa, to the slaves who were actually doing the work. The employees in Europe had solidly constructed homes and offices, whereas the workers in Africa had pieces of board flung together so haphazardly that light would shine through the cracks in large chunks. As for the slaves, they lived in huts and were chained together.
And alas, I have surpassed the word limit...by a lot.
I completely agree with your first paragraph. Although all the descriptions are supposed to enhance the story, I think that the image Conrad is trying to produce becomes muddled in the long descriptions. But I think that I got the overall picture of what I was reading.
ReplyDeleteI really like your point about how Mr. Kurtz may be Lucifer. The quote used by the accountant almost directly implies the devilish qualities of Mr. Kurtz. I think that this is Conrad's way of displaying his opinion of the imperialist system. Mr. Kurtz is the main man in this imperialism in Africa. Since the man who runs the system (Mr. Kurtz) is evil, inherently the system itself must also evil.