Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Heart of Darkness opens on a boat called "Nellie." Marlow and his shipmates, including the narrator whose descriptions of the scene fill the few breaks in Marlow's stories, loll on the deck waiting for the tides of the Thames River to change.  To entertain his compatriots, Marlow begins to talk about his philosophies on colonization, his personal history, and his voyage up the Congo River into the heart of Africa.  Like many storytellers, Marlow speaks in a stream of consciousness, skipping forward and backward in time without warning.  The reader is left to infer from symbolism the specifics of Marlow's narrative. 

Marlow abhors colonization.  He believes that when Europeans colonize other countries to exploit rather than to civilize, white men commit robbery and murder on "a great scale." His urgent feelings regarding colonization trigger Marlow to remember his trip into Africa.  However, before he begins that specific story he tells his audience about his fascination with maps and "empty spaces." Since he was a child, Marlow dreamed of venturing into the dark places on maps.  He gets a great chance, he explains, when his aunt helps him secure a position working for a European-based ivory company as a steamboat captain. 

Marlow's journey from London to the mouth of the Congo River quickly begins and as the steamboat chugs down the impenetrable coastline, briefly stopping at French stations to load and unload soldiers, docking with a French battleship upon which sailors died at a rate of three per day.  Marlow's disillusion and fascination grows as he approaches the first ivory station.  Rusted machinery, ill workers, and cluttered unkept grounds greet Marlow at the first station.  The native workers are horribly treated while the white characters suffer from disease, biting insects, and staggering heat.  Marlow finally leaves the station to begin a two hundred mile inland trek to the second station.

When Marlow arrives at the second station he finds that the steamboat that he was supposed to captain was wrecked at the bottom of the river.  Marlow turns to the manager of the second station for help.  The manager, who inspires uneasiness and distrust in Marlow, explains that an inexperienced captain had wrecked the steamboat days earlier when he and the manager started up-river to pick up Mr. Kurtz, the manager of the third station, who was reportedly gravely ill.  Marlow sets about looking for rivets to repair the steamboat.  The agents and manager at the station are oddly unwilling to help Marlow.  One night, an agent confides in Marlow that others at the station are weary of him because they view him as similar to Kurtz.  According to the agent, Kurtz and Marlow are both from the "new gang of virtue." With that insight, Marlow's disgust and uneasiness with his white colleagues grows as does in interest in meeting Kurtz.  Before he can meet Kurtz, however, Marlow must remain at the second station for several months to repair his boat.