Heart of Darkness

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Test

Essay Topics

Inner-Outer Circle Discussion Questions

Page Breaks
The Thames Setting

Stop: “However, through this glorious affair I got my appointment before I had fairly begun to hope for it”

Preparation for the Journey

 Start: “I flew around like mad to get ready and before forty-eight hours I was crossing the Channel to show myself to my employers and sign the contract”

Stop: “The best way I can explain it to you is by saying that for a second or two I felt as though instead of going to the centre of a continent I were about to set off for the centre of the earth.”

Journey: The First Stage

Start:   “I left in a French steamer 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.”

Stop: “In the steady buzz of flies the homeward-bound agent was lying flushed and insensible; the other bent over his books was making correct entries of perfectly correct transactions; and fifty feet below the doorstep I could see the still tree-tops of the grove of death”

The Central Station

Start:   “Next day, I left that station at last, with a caravan of sixty men, for a two-hundred-mile tramp.”

Stop:   “It was just two months away from the day we left the creek when we came to the bank below Kurtz’s station.”

Journey to the Inner Station:

Start:   “Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were king.”

Stop:   “But the snags were thick, the water was treacherous and shallow, the boiler seemed indeed to have a sulky devil in it, and thus neither that fireman nor I had any time to peer into our creepy thoughts.”

Life on the River

Start:   “Some fifty miles below the Inner Station we came upon a hut of reeds, an inclined and melancholy pole with the unrecognizable tatters of what had been a flag of some sort flying from it and a neatly stacked wood-pile.”

Stop:   “Here give me some tobacco”

The Arrival

 Start:   “There was a pause of profound stillness, then a match flared, and Marlow’s lean face appeared worn, hollow, and with downward folds and dropped eyelids with an aspect of concentrated attention; and as he took vigorous draws at his pipe it seemed to retreat and advance out of the night in the regular flicker of the tiny flame”

Stop: “He opened his arms wide, staring at me with his little blue eyes that were perfectly round.”

The Inner Station:

Start:   “I looked at him, lost in astonishment.”

Stop:   “He glanced through it hurriedly, mumbling all the time, judged ‘it would do,’ and took himself off with this plunder.”

The Intended:

Start:   “Thus I was left at last with a slim packet of letters and the girl’s portrait.”

