Bits and Pieces

While his mind has shown signs of change in terms of the way he describes things, more direct references to madness start to become more prominent, drawing a parallel between…

the trajectory of Kurtz and Marlow.

Marlow describes the way they could not see through the fog: “our eyes were no more use to us…

than if we had been buried miles deep in a heap of cotton wool. It felt […] choking, warm, stifling.” (58)

The white fog, as before, symbolises the limitations of…

Marlow’s viewpoint, (and in turn the European viewpoint)

The simile of ‘cotton wool’ is very…

multi-faceted.

• Cotton is heavily associated with colonial exploitation, being that it was one of the primary commodities of colonial trade. 

• Cotton wool also has connotations of…

• comfort and cleanliness, as though their skewed viewpoint is a comfort zone and is in some way sanitised against the brutal reality of what colonialism is doing. Conveniently, cotton wool is also typically white! 

• This is echoed by the tricolon – ‘choking, warm, stifling’ 🡪 while their ‘foggy’ view of the world is inhibited, it is also warm and comforting!