Heart Of Darkness By Joseph Conrad

Traditionally, silence has been marked as peaceful, as the lack of a sound and thus an overarching tranquility. However, in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the peace found in quietude could not be more fictitious. Just as darkness is merely the absence of light, this novel highlights that silence is merely the lack of sound. And while sound can offer threat, the lack of sound could offer an even greater hazard, one of incognito and guerilla peril. Marlow consistently makes the menacing intentions of his surroundings known through his ironic language and ominous characterizations of his trip down the Congo. With such a passive motif as silence, Conrad proclaims irony proudly and affirms this novel’s cultural significance.
To start, Marlow
“An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest” all characterize the environment as such a stillness drove the men slightly mad (30). Occasionally, “an unrestful and noisy dream” would evoke the past “amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants, and water, and silence” (30). As Marlow states: “And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect” (30). When these men felt most lost, they would remind themselves of their mission, and “the word ivory would ring in the air for a while” until they “went again into the silence, along empty reaches, round the still bends” (31). Sporadically, “the roll of drums” would ominously interrupt the quietude “as if hovering in the air,” but “whether it meant war, peace, or prayer,” the men could not know
Just after meeting Kurtz for the first time, Marlow is struck by the “wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman” who appears outside their ship (55). “[T]reading the earth proudly,” her ornate appearance and celestial confidence stunned the men, yet “there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress,” highlighting a “hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land” (55-56). She stared at the men on the boat for a significant amount of time with “an air of brooding over an inscrutable purpose” and “as if her life had depended upon the unswerving steadiness of her glance” (56). After glaring some more, the woman descended into the wildnerness, and “a formidable silence hung over the scene” (56). At the very end of the novel, after Kurtz dies and Marlow agrees to visit his fiance, Marlow exchanges words with the woman without any meaning behind them. She claims to have “‘mourned so long in silence -- in silence’” and fears that in his last moments, Kurtz’s dying words were met with emptiness (71). Rather than allowing her to live with this notion, Marlow leaves her under the pretext that “‘the last word he pronounced was -- [her] name,’” a decision which haunts him to the point which he tells his odyssey to the crew. The woman, however, has heard exactly what