- he dead'" (112). There is even a Penelope waiting in mourning clothes for the dead "hero" Kurtz, of whom Marlowe speaks, "She struck me as beautiful - I mean she had a beautiful expression. I know that the sunlight can be made to lie, too" (115).
Heart of Darkness' storyline begins in a Shakespearean setting of light and urban civility. Narrator Marlowe is guest aboard a rich man's sailboat, relaxing along an English river never far from the city. All is comfort and security. Then, as night descends, a new mood takes over. Marlowe's narrative begins in darkness, in fact, erupting as a speculation on the darkness of the English river they float upon as it must have appeared two millennia earlier. Then he rambles into his African tale, where anything familiar is lost within minutes. This is how A Midsummer Night's Dream and a score of other classic English myth-tales begin: first there is the city, where civilization holds sway over lives in an orderly fashion - but the protagonists soon find themselves in the forest, Arden perhaps, or some other wilderness where fairies and magic overtake the night.
Marlowe is not describing fairies and pastoral magic, however, only the heated darkness of the forest/jungle. He accumulates details that explain the decision to escape from civilization: a childhood longing to explore an undefined map, a city that reminds Marlowe of a biblical "whited sepulchre" (35), the simple need to earn a living at one's trade. Then he travels to Africa itself, a journey that carries with it an air of slow futility. "I left in a French steamer," he recounts,
and she called in every blamed port they have out there, for, as far as I could see, the sole purpose of landing soldiers and custom-house officers. ... Some, I heard, got drowned in the surf; but whether they did or not, nobody seemed particularly to care. They were just flung out there, and on we went. (39-40)
This apathetic valuation ...