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Heart of Darkness Good vs. Evil Quotes Page 16
Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Paragraph)
"The dusk came gliding into it long before the sun had set." (2.13)
Darkness comes early to the interior, a place so deep in the heart of darkness that the sun cannot shine for the full twelve hours of daylight. This suggests that evil has a greater hold in the interior than outside.
"Their headman, a young, broad-chested black, severely draped in dark-blue fringed cloths, with fierce nostrils and his hair all done up artfully in oily ringlets, stood near me. 'Aha!' I said, just for good fellowship's sake. 'Catch 'im,' he snapped, with a bloodshot widening of his eyes and a flash of sharp teeth - 'catch 'im. Give 'im to us.' 'To you, eh?' I asked; 'what would you do with them?' 'Eat 'im!' he said curtly, and, leaning his elbow on the rail, looked out into the fog in a dignified and profoundly pensive attitude. I would no doubt have been properly horrified, had it not occurred to me that he and his chaps must be very hungry: that they must have been growing increasingly hungry for at least this month past." (2.14)
Marlow, despite himself, feels sympathy for the native Africans. He pities them for having not been able to indulge in their natural diet for so long. He knows the excruciating pain of prolonged hunger and feels pity for them even though they are so different from him.
[Marlow describing Kurtz’s speech]: "The point was in his being a gifted creature, and that of all his gifts the one that stood out pre-eminently, that carried with it a sense of real presence, was his ability to talk, his words – the gift of expression, the bewildering, the illuminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness." (2.24)
Language can be used for good or evil.
