Alienation is the dominant theme and narrative dynamic of Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener," which portrays Bartleby as deliberately positioning himself on the social and transpersonal periphery and the lawyer as socially (and unwillingly) alienated not only from Bartleby in particular but also from the higher society to which he aspires to belong in general.
In Heart of Darkness Conrad links the remote environment of the river in the Congo with the environment of European colonialism in Africa and the exotic mystery of Mr. Kurtz to create a grim story that has resonance with what Martin Luther King, Jr., called in a not unrelated context "the bleakness of nagging despair" (91). The figure of Marlow, who tells the story of Kurtz, is consistent with alienation and separation from both Africa and Europe. He explains that his experience as a sailor is darker and more alien than that of most of his mates. He is "not typical" of most seamen, who lead a "sedentary life" (Conrad 7) by virtue of their being at home only aboard ship, wherever on earth the ship might take them. The fact that Marlow is as it were a fish out of water in the Congo makes him a displaced representative of seamen, even though his command of the riverboat also makes him a representative of the shipping company's institutional/colonial authority.
Conrad's structuring of Marlow's character can be taken as a deliberate portrayal of alien consciousness. Marlow recalls and comments with some irony on his aunt's fatuous raptures in anticipation of his journey to Africa, in missionary terms: "something like an emissary of light, something like a lower sort of apostle. There had been a lot of such rot let loose in print and talk just about that time" (Conrad 19).
Kurtz is an alien in exile, isolated upcountry at the mysterious Inner Station and thus something of a legend among fellow ivory hunters and the indigenous peoples with whom he has established himself, hal...