After signing his enlistment papers with the Company, Marlow in Heart of Darkness exits the waiting room with a sense of ominous foreboding –at least that is how he recollects the event as part of the larger narrative of his Congo journey. From that point forward, the narrative proceeds inexorably towards Marlow’s encounter with Kurtz in the interior of the ‘Dark Continent’, where time seems to move backward to the ‘prehistoric ages’. It is not just the African environment that contributes to Marlow’s impression, but also his appraisal of the Africans themselves, which Conrad marks in Marlow’s speech parenthetically:

While Conrad, through Marlow and the frame narrator, does not draw out the implications of this timelessness with respect to waiting, throughout Heart of Darkness, Marlow’s anxious waiting contrasts sharply with his African others. Without a ‘clear idea of time’, without a sense of the present retreating into the past, and without a sense of progression into the future, the Africans appear not to experience waiting the way that Marlow does. As Chinua Achebe pointed out in 1976, this depiction ‘was and is the dominant image of Africa in the Western imagination and Conrad merely brought the peculiar gifts of his own mind to bear on it’.