This book scares me.

The majority of the time I spent reading this first passage of “Heart of Darkness,” I found myself composed in a constant state of worry. My right eyebrow remained arched in confusion while I gripped the book tightly in both hands. The ominous, stormy tone of the novel is so powerful it becomes virtually tangible; that “deep breath before the plunge” feeling (Gandalf for the WIN) saturates every sentence.

Conrad establishes the eerie mood largely through the specific details of the lighting of the scene; precisely the same way stage lights are employed in theater. The sun is described as “if stricken to death by the touch of that gloom brooding over a crowd of men.” That single depiction is so jammed packed full of dark and threatening imagery it sinks its poisonous touch throughout the passage; it creates the heavy fog of uncertainty and anxiety that surrounds the story.

Marlow’s sudden outburst of subconscious rambling about historic comparisons seemed at first a bit out of place and not in sync with the rest of the scene as no other character had spoken yet at all and here goes one man babbling on for several pages about the worries of Romans. But upon retrospect, I found that portion to include many highly symbolic lines full of foreshadowing. When Marlow explains that the Romans “...were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force- nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others” I immediately sensed some sort of significance. With further reading, I reached the point at which Marlow tells the story of Captain Fresleven and his brutality towards the natives, I felt a LIGHTBULB! moment occur. The two stories play off of each other’s themes to produce a profound foreshadowing effect of further inescapable and inevitable evil.