Answer the following about the book
1.Consider the protagonist, Marlow What is he like? List some adjectives youd use to describe him. How sympathetic a character to you find him to be?
2.Kurtz is a much more shadowy figure but consider what is said about him by others and what hes actually like when Marlow finally encounters him. Again, providing a list of adjectives might help you to begin generating a fulsome answer about his character.
3.Compare the local inhabitants of the area near the Inner Station (Kurtzs headquarters) with the Europeans we meet in the story. How is each group described and portrayed? In the course of a very famous passage about which Im sure well have much to say, Marlow observes of the natives what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanitylike yoursthe thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar (page 36 in the fifth Norton edition). How do you react to his commentary on his own reaction?
4.Now that the foregoing questions have directed you to consider character, lets switch tracks to setting. We begin in London, on its own famous river, the Thames, shift with Marlows narrative to the sepulchral city (Brussels), before the story takes us down the Atlantic coast of Africa and up the River Congo. What do you notice about these varied settings, European and African? Are we to see similarities between the locales north of the equator and those south of it? What are we to conclude about the differences in the way these settings are depicted? What is a sepulcher after all?
