When the Darkness comes?

From the first sentence, of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, he illustrates a few key ideas that were fairly important to Britain at the time. The two things Conrad starts off by describing are the boat, the Nellie, and the river Thames. 'Precious space' is used to tell us about the clusters of vessels on the river and create the atmosphere, implying that physical manifestations of progress was highly valued. It isn’t until the third paragraph that we meet any actual people. Even then, only one of the five men on the Nellie was given a name. Marlow, our eventual narrator, was accompanying these men that are eventually named or labeled by their professions – the Director of Companies, the lawyer, and the accountant – and nothing more.
As I continued to meander through the first thirty-some-odd pages, I tried to get a sense of the character Marlow. To start off with, the guy likes to talk. Completely unprovoked and afloat in the middle of water, he launches into part of his life story, and a very important part, it seems-at least it was to him. Within the first few pages, Marlow dives into his thoughts on the idea of conquering land, of “taking [it] away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves,” declaring that it “is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.” He acknowledges the harshness and wrongness of what they do, but continues to say that it’s okay because they have “efficiency” and an “unselfish belief in the idea” of what they are doing. I’ll admit that acknowledgement is the first step to recovery, but that’s all it is: the first step. Admitting that what you take part in is bad but continuing to do it is like repeatedly eating a food you know will make you nauseous, it does not benefit either party.
Oddly enough, it is that very same willful ignorance, that the British carried along with them to Africa. Conrad manages to embody this idea in the character, Mr. Kurtz. When Marlow first arrived at Central Station, only to discover that his steamer sank, he hears all about a Mr. Kurtz from the manager of the station and a young, aristocratic agent of the company. However it is when the aristocrat then goes on to say that Mr. Kurtz is “an emissary of pity, and science, and progress"-the embodiment of Western ideals, that I discovered the true extent of this personification. I found it very odd that he [Mr. Kurtz] ended up in the Congo where pity doesn’t seem to be held in high esteem. Perhaps Mr. Kurtz would have second thoughts about his presence in a land that didn’t welcome him-something that I hope will be revealed in later parts of the book.
After reading the essay that Chinua Achebe had written about Heart of Darkness, I had some-sort of bias towards this book and its ideals. I received a negative connotation from every word as I looked deeper into the imagery of what Conrad was trying to portray. Perhaps it's not so much Conrad speaking to the reader, or even the unnamed narrator, but it is Marlow, and his point of view. There were many times in Part I when I started to question the validity of Marlow's story. He seemed like a proud man, one that has been through a lot and wants to boast about what he has survived through, but could he be over exaggerating more than a few parts of his story?
All in all, I found Part I of Heart of Darkness to be very intriguing and mildly overwhelming. Yet, I am eager to learn more about these characters and their reactions to events they are to face in the rest of the book.