Return To “The Sepulchral City”

Joseph Conrad ends his book with an enigmatic paragraph I must analyze in order to understand the true meaning of the book. With it Conrad tells an important part of the book's meaning and connects the context where the book's narration takes place and the plot's events. Here, he concludes his book: "The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky- seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness." (146).

We can divide this sentence into two main parts. The first part describes the boats surroundings. These continue being dark, gray and dead which creates symmetry with the book's beginning. A dead landscape, covered with clouds that met with the sea in the horizon. These bleak surroundings represent the solitude and uncertainties that surrounded Conrad's mind. Although these characteristics exist symmetrically in the book, one thing changed: an exit to that world. Whether industrialization and all that makes a modern man created these distinct characteristics in him does not matter. In end, Conrad tries to give us Africa as an exit to that darkness. In that "heart of an immense darkness" we should find and therefore, we need a description of the Africa presented to us in the book's narrative in order to understand this possible exit.

Marlow's voyage to meet an ideal Kurtz that was only a disappoint reality, we can characterize Africa. The continent was wild, savage, untamable unpredictable and, above all, real. Seeing the artificial lives Europeans had, Conrad saw reality in an Africa. The false ideals his imperialistic society imposed on him died there. Although they were great, like Kurtz was, truth would inevitably overpower them. Indeed, for Conrad the only exit from that artificial bleak and industrialized Europe was that "heart": Africa.