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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!
