Passage:
“The dusk was falling. I had to wait in a lofty drawing-room with three long windows from floor to ceiling that were like three luminous and bedraped columns. The bent gilt legs and backs of the furniture shone in indistinct curves. The tall marble fireplace had a cold and monumental whiteness. A grand piano stood massively in a corner; with dark gleams on the flat surfaces like a sombre and polished sarcophagus. A high door opened — closed. I rose.
“She came forward, all in black, with a pale head, floating towards me in the dusk. She was in mourning. It was more than a year since his death, more than a year since the news came; she seemed as though she would remember and mourn forever. She took both my hands in hers and murmured, ‘I had heard you were coming.’ I noticed she was not very young — I mean not girlish. She had a mature capacity for fidelity, for belief, for suffering. The room seemed to have grown darker, as if all the sad light of the cloudy evening had taken refuge on her forehead. This fair hair, this pale visage, this pure brow, seemed surrounded by an ashy halo from which the dark eyes looked out at me. Their glance was guileless, profound, confident, and trustful. She carried her sorrowful head as though she were proud of that sorrow, as though she would say, ‘I — I alone know how to mourn for him as he deserves.’ But while we were still shaking hands, such a look of awful desolation came upon her face that I perceived she was one of those creatures that are not the playthings of Time. For her he had died only yesterday. And, by Jove! the impression was so powerful that for me, too, he seemed to have died only yesterday — nay, this very minute. I saw her and him in the same instant of time — his death and her sorrow — I saw her sorrow in the very moment of his death. Do you understand? I saw them together — I heard them together. She had said, with a deep catch of the breath, ‘I have survived’ while my strained ears seemed to hear distinctly, mingled with her tone of despairing regret, the summing up whisper of his eternal condemnation. I asked myself what I was doing there, with a sensation of panic in my heart as though I had blundered into a place of cruel and absurd mysteries not fit for a human being to behold. She motioned me to a chair. We sat down. I laid the packet gently on the little table, and she put her hand over it. . . . ‘You knew him well,’ she murmured, after a moment of mourning silence.
Response:
Joseph Conrad has the ability to cleverly write in a way that leads the reader in the dark, but capable of understanding the story if the reader closely follows along. His impressionistic style is clearly demonstrated in the passage above when he’s describing the moment between him and Kurtz’s “Intended”.
The setting is in a lofty drawing room, with a cold feeling in the air. He also states that in the room, a grand piano stood in the corner “with dark gleams…like a sombre and polished sarcophagus”. This scene was written over a year after Kurtz’s death – a time when mourning should be done with. However, Conrad purposely placed those words in this part of the novel to evoke sorrow from the reader and for the reader to revisit the dark death of Mister Kurtz.
He follows this scene with the entrance of Kurtz’s Intended. Conrad states that “she came forward, all in black, with a pale head, floating towards me in the dusk.” By doing this, he’s trying to create visual imagery for the reader of a ghost coming towards him. As he continues, he states the “room seemed to have grown darker”. Later in the paragraph, he writes of how she is filled with sorrow to the point in which it felt like Kurtz had died only yesterday. By doing this, it reveals to the reader of how miserable Kurtz’s Intended is.
As you can see, Conrad is ridiculously good at casting a gloomy impressionistic style upon the reader. His impressive use of word choices allow the reader to feel the sorrow in which the characters themselves feel. This passage here is only one out of the many passages in which reveal his cleverly crafted impressionistic style.
