In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Marlow is unable to find work as a captain of an ocean vessel and so, as a last resort, signs on as a riverboat captain in Africa.
As he approaches his company’s outpost, he sees French warships insanely bombing the African jungle without an enemy in sight.
Upon arriving at the outpost, Marlow gets his first close look at the human cost of colonization. As narrator, he remarks, “ Black shapes crouched Les side between the trees leaning against the trunks clinging to the Earth half coming out half and faced with in the damn light and all the attitudes of pain abandonment of despair… They were dying slowly it was very clear that we’re not enemies they were not criminals they were nothing earthly now nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation…”
Skyler depicts the scene. As Marlow described only what he saw beneath the trees, the artists paints would might be seen in the trees.
