Hello, and welcome to my futon bunk-bed. Today we're gonna be doing a quick
rundown, real, real quick, of the last chapter of Heart of Darkness chapter 3.
So I'm gonna try and give you the main events and just a quick summary of them
so you have an idea of what's going on in the chapter in case you missed any
days or are a little confused about the readings. Okay, so first things first:
chapter 3. At the start we don't know Mr. Kurtz yet (still haven't seen him yet).
We're at the edge of his camp, and we meet Kurtz's last disciple. He's this
Harlequin type character who's dressed like a jester and speaks Russian (about
it's crazy of a characters you can get). And he tells us about Kurtz, but we still
haven't seen him so Marlow, or Conrad, keeps teasing Marlow and that he keeps getting
closer and closer to Kurtz without actually meeting him. There's a reason
Kurtz doesn't welcome him at the shore rather it's the Harlequin, Russian
character. So finally Kurtz is being brought in to
the camp, but before that we see that there's these fence posts all around the
camp but there's no connectors to the fences, right? So it's very similar to the
other style of Impressionism that Conrad used in the novel, like with the
arrows or with the spear, and those fence posts are actually stakes.
And there's not decorative knobs on top of them like Marlow thinks at first
glance, There's human heads...yeah. So the disciple, the Russian the Harlequin, tells
Marlow that these are the heads of traders but Marlow doesn't buy it.
Marlow hasn't bought into Kurtz and somehow this Russian character is like
24, 25 years old; has not been able to realize that Kurtz is a madman. He's been
seduced by him so to speak, by his words and that he sees him as an
enlightening figure. So Kurtz has very, very powerful words and when we see him
brought in this...this murderer, this madman, that we've heard all about,
he's not a big strong individual, he's like a skeleton. He's brought in on a
stretcher by the tribes and we find out that he's been using the tribes to fight
each other; to take ivory. But, here he's been reduced to a skeleton, but he has
this crazy mouth that opens very wide; this booming voice that's heard out of
it. And there we finally meet Mr. Kurtz, not strong physically but strong vocally,
right? A great speaker. So the disciple Harlequin realizes, "hey, I should hightail
it out of here because people just came and they have guns and realized that we
put heads on a stake." So he heads on out of there and we still haven't talked to
Kurtz yet. In fact, we actually haven't heard Kurtz speak (maybe from a distance) but we still
haven't talked to Kurtz- which is what Marlow really wants: he's driven forward
by the voice. So Marlow is asleep up on, you know, the top of his ship he's like,
"la da da da da," you know, like wakes up in the middle of the night and there's a
fire where the pilgrims are and a fire where the natives are and they're keeping
watch over each other. He sees this thing crawling in the dark, so he goes, he runs,
after it by himself and he comes upon Kurtz and Kurtz is literally crawling on
his hands and knees toward the darkness; toward the tribe for this like devil- worship ritual type thing as Marlow describes it.
And Marlow gets him brings
him back and finally he's put on the ship to be returned to Europe. The tribes
chase after him and his African mistress is stretching her arms out toward him,
and the Europeans, proving once again that they are more savage than the
Africans, start opening fire on them for no reason until Marlow blows the whistle
- and the natives run away. So now, we're on the boat headed around the
coast of Africa and Marlow is talking to Kurtz. Kurtz is kind of babbling about
past things. He's still very concerned with his ivory, with his reputation, and
he asks Marlow to be the keeper of his reputation and his papers, right? So
Marlow comes in one day with a candle, a single candle, and Kurtz doesn't look at
the light of the candle. He's laying there in this dark, almost
pitch-black cabin, and he doesn't look at the light- which is odd because our eyes
are really drawn towards the light, right? But Kurtz stares at the darkness instead.
He says this single phrase, "the horror, the horror" and then Marlow goes to
dinner. We find out Kurtz is dead; those were his last words- very key and
important last words. It's the reason he stared at the darkness as opposed
to the light, which we were more instinctively inclined to look at. So
they land in Europe and everyone's trying to get a piece of Kurtz, so to
speak, they're trying to get his papers and Marlowe is not giving them to him, or
at least trying to give them to the right people, and even calls Kurtz a
remarkable man. And we're not quite sure why Marlow is protecting Kurtz. In fact, I'm
not entirely sure Marlowe knows why he's protecting Kurtz. But what is clear
as he returns to the sepulcheral city of Brussels is that everywhere he goes
he's hearing Kurtz. He's hearing him; he's seeing him; Kurtz's memory is personified
as this figure following him. It's almost like this post-traumatic stress
disorder type description of what's happening to
Marlow. And he decides he's going to visit Kurtz's intended, that being a
fiancee, right? So he visits the Intended. He walks in the room and the light is
dying outside but the intended has very fair hair and fair skin and it's like
the light is being sucked toward her as it exits the room. Marlow is
sitting there talking to her, she's been in mourning for over a year, and she
tells Marlow, this is what Conrad loves to do, giving these descriptions in a
roundabout way we learn more about Kurtz from before he went to Africa, because
she tells Marlow about who he was before he went to Africa and by all
descriptions he's a great man. He's in love with her and her family doesn't
approve because he's not rich enough so what drives him to Africa is to get
money to impress the parents of the woman he loves and who he wants to marry.
And she doesn't realize what happened to him out there and Marlow let's slip that
he heard Kurtz's last words and she asks for them and these are the words
that have haunted Marlow- he wants to give them away; he wants to be free of
this burden- and instead Marlow says, rather than "the horror, the horror" that
were his famous last words, he says that his last words were, "your name" and he spares
her the truth of that whole situation. And that's that's how our novel ends. We
then jump back to the outermost frame on the belt - on the belt on - the boat, sorry
no belts, on the boat and there's one paragraph there and then that's how the
novel ends. So next video I'd like to give you some key
quotes, but make sure you watch past videos if you are like my students and
you have a final/test coming up. And best of luck and everything !Hope
you've enjoyed the novel and these have been helpful. Leave me a comment if you
need something else to be more beneficial to you. Have a good one!