As the jungle grows more frightening and mysterious, Marlow struggles to keep himself calm and "European. Despite the fact that the book itself An Inquiry into Some Points of Seamanship looks "dreary reading enough," Marlow is excited by its very existence as "something unmistakably real.
The death of the helmsman is another scene where Marlow attempts to make the reality of his situation "fade. In addition to intensifying the reader's understanding of Marlow's impending epiphany, Part 2 contains a digression where he abandons his narrative and speaks of Kurtz in a general sense.
Unlike the cannibals, Kurtz possessed a ravenous hunger: "You should have heard him say. His "nerves went wrong" and he participated in "unspeakable rites. More importantly, Kurtz is not an isolated figure — all of Europe has produced him, and the power, hunger, and evil he embodies.
Oh—he's the kind of fireman who starts fires in the boiler , not the kind who puts them out. The fireman has been told that if the water in the boiler ever disappears, the evil spirit inside will take revenge. Well, it's probably more effective motivation than a paycheck. They find an abandoned hut with a book inside: "An Inquiry into some Points of Seamanship," full of sailor shop-talk. Marlow finds this a comforting touch of reality.
At dawn on the third day, after an eerily still night, a thick fog keeps them from going anywhere. Naturally, trouble ensues: there's loud and sad-sounding shouting somewhere in the mist. The Westerners freak out, but the cannibals stay pretty chill.
In fact, one wants to find and eat the shouter. Marlow wonders why the cannibals, being cannibals and all, haven't tried to eat one of the white pilgrims yet. We wonder, too. We're also very nervous about this whole situation. Two hours later, the fog lifts and they continue.
The cannibals anticipate this and dive for the deck a split second before the arrows fall. The cannibal helmsman is the most freaked out. He abandons his position steering the boat, grabs a big gun, and shoots into the bush. A disgruntled Marlow is forced to do some energetic emergency steering.
In the meantime, the helmsman gets himself killed. By a spear. In the chest. He falls and a pool of blood oozes around Marlow's shoes. Marlow, horrified, watches the man die at his feet.
That was the anvil of foreshadowing landing on the deck next to the pool of blood. Marlow blows the steam-whistle to scare off the attackers. Instead, Marlow and Kurtz confront one another in a dark forest, with no one else around.
Marlow seems to stand both physically and metaphorically between Kurtz and a final plunge into madness and depravity, as symbolized by the native sorcerer presiding over the fire at the native camp. It occurs to Marlow that, from a practical standpoint, he should strangle Kurtz. The nearness of the natives puts Marlow in danger, and Kurtz is going to die soon anyway. Yet to kill Kurtz would not only be hypocritical but, for Marlow, impossible.
Kurtz has already judged, and rejected, the standards by which other people are judged, and thus it seems irrelevant to bring such standards back to bear on him. Having rejected European society, Kurtz has been forced to look into his own soul, and this introspection has driven him mad. Despite the hypocrisy latent in social norms, these norms provide a framework of security and defined expectations within which an individual can exist.
In Freudian terms, we might say that Kurtz has lost his superego, and that it is the terror of limitless freedom, with no oversight or punishment, that leads to his madness.
Kurtz now knows himself to be capable of anything. The two white men stand over him as he dies quietly. Marlow expects that Kurtz is now dead as well, and he feels a terrible disappointment at the thought. Marlow laughs at the man, whose comfortable bourgeois existence has never brought him into contact with anything the likes of Africa.
Marlow makes a major error of interpretation in this section when he decides that the cries coming from the riverbank do not portend an attack. That he is wrong is more or less irrelevant, since the steamer has no real ability to escape. The fog that surrounds the boat is literal and metaphorical: it obscures, distorts, and leaves Marlow with only voices and words upon which to base his judgments. This has been both enriching and dangerous for Marlow.
On the one hand, having the figure of Kurtz available as an object for contemplation has provided a release for Marlow, a distraction from his unsavory surroundings, and Kurtz has also functioned as a kind of blank slate onto which Marlow can project his own opinions and values. Kurtz gives Marlow a sense of possibility. Moreover, Marlow focuses his energies and hopes on a man who may be nothing like the legends surrounding him.
However, with nothing else to go on and no other alternatives to the manager and his ilk, Marlow has little choice. Indeed, they even show flashes of humor, as when their leader teases Marlow by saying that they would like to eat the owners of the voices they hear coming from the shore.
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