Conrad begins his novella not in Africa but on the Thames, where an unnamed narrator sits aboard a pleasure ship, the Nellie, with four other men. This nameless persona begins a sort of collective first person (first person plural) account of man’s relationship with the sea. He speaks generally of sea-going men and bonds forged on the water before moving on to discuss the Thames in particular as a waterway of historical import that has made men famous. “Knights all,” he calls them, “titled and untitled---the great knights-errant of the sea” (Conrad 8). This first person narration, though brief, becomes a harbinger of themes the reader will further view only after Marlow begins to describe his time in Africa. The “bond of the sea” discussed in the very opening of the novel will be seen again when Marlow begins to equate himself with his crew of African “cannibals” as he floats up the Congo River into the continent’s interior (Conrad 7). Further parallels include the Congo’s role as a carrier of “the dreams of men [like Kurtz and, to a certain extent, Marlow], the seed of commonwealths, the germ of empires,” all phrases used by the unidentified speaker to describe the role of the Thames throughout history (Conrad 8).
As the unnamed man continues to speak, he eventually comes to describe Marlow, the only man on board the Nellie who still “‘followed the sea’” (Conrad 9). He observes that Marlow does not fall victim to the common seaman’s folly of characterizing a land after a brief walk on its shores. Instead, he found the “meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside,” suggesting a deeper understanding of the world and events than the average sailor and thereby establishing Marlow as a man of experience and education whose later narration can be trusted and judged insightful (Conrad 9). Following this brief descriptive interlude, Marlow begins to tell his own story and thoughts, thereby demoting the unnamed speaker to a listener and infrequent interjector. In literary terms, Marlow’s usurping of the narration makes the original speaker into a “frame narrator.”
Marlow’s own story is told in the first person singular. It is simply the tale of his journey from Europe to Africa, and then into the interior to locate Kurtz. His observations are often aimed at the world around him (“The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there---there you could look at a thing monstrous and free”) (Conrad 37). However, he is also capable of self-reflection and awareness of his connection with even those savage cannibals who crew his riverboat. “What thrilled you,” he explained, “was just the thought of their humanity---like yours---the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar” (Conrad 37-38). From comments like these, the reader sees Marlow’s centrist position; he is not so arrogant as many of the Company’s men to think that Europeans like himself are without any savagery, but neither is he willing, like Kurtz, to forgo all signs of civilized life to quench his own ambitions and desires. This moderate stance establishes Marlow as a trustworthy and appropriate narrator.
