Cry Me a Congo

Today in class we were discussing the lines that either stood out, shocked, or surprised us the most. Most of the lines that came up were about how Marlow described the people he encountered in ways that dehumanized them or made them seem grotesque but the line that stood out the most to me was when he said "The man seemed young – almost a boy – but you know with them it's hard to tell"(20). The fact that he can make an offhand comment about how the man could be almost any age and it would be impossible to tell are shows how he finds them to all be the same tells a lot about the attitude that he is going into Africa with. One of the most disturbing lines occurs where it seems like he has just realized that all of the native Africans are people too. When he sees them on the shore from the river he thinks “Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you…could comprehend” (43). Whether this is a belief that Conrad shares or not he does an excellent job of shocking the reader with how nonchalantly Marlow can bring that up. It isn’t a huge moment of realization, instead it seems as though it is something that Marlow feels that a man would have to stoop down to admit to himself or to others.