What If: Marlow is an Unreliable Narrator

In Heart of Darkness, Marlow is not the typical passive and omniscient narrator. As a character himself, he has difficulty telling his own story; he says it is like describing a dream. Thus the phrase "unreliable narrator" was used repeatedly in our class discussions.

Yet I at least assumed that Conrad only added this concept in as commentary on the way we exchange and process information. It seemed unlikely Conrad would have wanted any reader to take this unreliability to seriously because they might then discredit the entire book.

But what if Marlow is lying about his experiences, either to himself or to his crewmates? This assumption undermines any analysis of the book's events. On the other hand, it allows us to see Marlow  the character more clearly. If the events of Marlow's story are edited, then he must have had a motive for every word.

This brings up a couple of questions. First of all, why did Marlow start to tell the story in the first place? Marlow begins talking about the ancient Roman conquest out of the blue. He doesn't bother to actually compare it to modern colonialism, and instead just abruptly changes topics.

However, before he changes topics he mentions an idea being the only redeemer of conquest of a new territory. This, the, is probably the central to Marlow's goal in telling the story. Perhaps this is the idea in which the social climber at the station references, when he talks about Kurtz genius and his efforts.

Kurtz too attempts to use this idea to his advantage, with his brilliant essay on the proper way to civilize the "savages" of Africa. Kurtz clearly doesn't believe in this by the time he dies, and it appears that Marlow doesn't either.

For near the beginning of his story, Marlow talks about how meeting Kurtz "seemed to throw a kind of light." Yet his last words in the novel are "It would have been too dark-too dark altogether." From this contrast it seems that Marlow's story is really meant to tell his companions about the fading of light, the fading of enlightened ideals which occurs in Africa.

Thus I believe Achebe when he says Heart of Darkness is a warning about the Kongo. If Marlow does have motive, he seems to be telling us that it is in the Kongo that the lights of London, of civilization, fade into darkness.