A snake is associated with fear and cold blooded and a feeling of evil Hence giving the river an association with evil. Meaning that Marlow was going to have to travel up a river, which has evil snake like characteristics, this means that the basis of Marlow’s journey has an evil base to it. When Marlow talking about the river on page 60 he uses repeated words and Hyphens to create a worried atmosphere “the reality – the reality” Marlow is questioning the safeness of the river, he has to be wary of all the ‘increasingly evil things the water could carry to damage the boat.
Marlow talks in a voice as if he were speaking to some one else not narrating the story. The further he moves down the river he is moving closer to Kurtz station but also moving further into the darkness of the earliest times. The darker it get’s the further into the river the more evil it is getting and at the center the most evil you can get Kurtz’s property aligned with all of his heads. The ultimate of the evil in the novel Ivory: – The ivory symbolises the greed of the Europeans.
The light is good metaphor is reversed here meaning that the light and supposedly good Europeans are turned over and turn them themselves in to nothing but evil savages just like the natives. Kurtz with all of his heads on sticks is a good example of how they abuse their power. Kurtz’s painting – The symbol of the painting at the inner station is of a blindfolded woman with her face distorted carrying a lighted torch. The women possibly symbolises the view of the Europeans from the natives point of view this is the reason her face has become distorted because the natives hate the Europeans very much.
The lighted torch could easily represent the values that the light Europeans are trying to force onto the natives. The reason she is blind folded is possibly because of the ways that the Europeans don’t see what they are doing to the natives and how they don’t like it. This is situated in one of the middle stations possibly showing that the ignorance of the Europeans is the middle or heart of most of the problem with the savages.
