Essay Outline

Africa is portrayed as the antithesis of the Europe by presenting the land and its inhabitants as savage and unfamiliar compared to London which is grand and civil.

Marlow describes  London, as gloomy and ominous yet grand and a shining example of society.
     "A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth."(16)

To Marlow, the African wilderness is still dark and vast, but compared to his description of London, Africa is much more menacing and unknown.
     "This one [coast] was almost featureless, as if still in the making, with an aspect of monotonous grimness. The edge of a colossal jungle, so dark-green as to be almost black, fringed with white surf, ran straight, like a ruled line, far, far away along a blue sea whose glitter was blurred by a creeping mist. The sun was fierce, the land seemed to glisten and drip with steam." (25)

Marlow distinguishes the Europeans from the African natives, by describing the natives similarly to animals.
    "A burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling, under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage. The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy." (68)

Compared to the natives, the Europeans are intelligent and scholarly.
"He was an improved specimen; he could fire up a vertical boiler. He was there below me, and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat, walking on his hind-legs...He ought to have been clapping his hands and stamping his feet on the bank, instead of which he was hard at work, a thrall to strange witchcraft, full of improving knowledge." (30)

Marlow nearly acknowledges the African humanity as a form of civilization.
     "But what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it."