rk tone of the story, revealing that he had done some fresh-water steamboat sailing in what appears to have been the Belgian Congo and that he got his job partly because he had pursued a dream to satisfy his African wanderlust and partly because his predecessor had been slain by a tribal chieftain. The point is that Marlow is "not typical," a bit more of a wanderer than most seamen, who the narrator says lead a "sedentary life" 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 status as captain of the riverboat also positions him as a representative of the shipping company's institutional authority. Indeed, Marlow recalls his aunt's fatuous raptures in anticipation of his embarking on 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." Kurtz turns out to be even more an exile, isolated upcountry at the mysterious Inner Station and in consequence something of a legend among his fellow ivory hunters and among the indigenous peoples with whom he has established himself, half god and half king, half aggrandized and half in physical peril. Marlow's voyage upriver to find and retrieve Kurtz from the Inner Station marks the narrative progress of Heart of Darkness. What Marlow discovers about the darkness of Kurtz's heart and of the hearts of the whites and blacks in Belgian Africa marks him and his view of Europe in Africa and defines the emotional progress of the story.
The Tempest and Heart of Darkness may not seem at first glance to lend themselves readily to comparison. The Tempest is a play in the shape of comic romance, lightened by poetic imagery, magic, and music. Heart of Darkness is a brooding piece of ...