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may also tease the reader with something akin to optical illusion is perhaps also hinted at in the word ‘moonshine’.
    An equivalent sense of expressive riddle inheres not only in how we see things, but also in how we hear them. An episode at the beginning of Part II presents Marlow drowsing on the deck of his steamer and suddenly disturbed by broken fragments of a conversation between The Manager and his nephew, who are sometimes too far away for him to hear them properly. Marlow’s imperfect overhearing means that the conversation emerges without a connective logic. It brings him revealing but puzzling ‘snatches’ (39) that only serve to generate further glimpses of Kurtz. A more important form of partial hearing arrives through the constant ellipses that steadily invade Marlow’s narration in the form of unfinished or interrupted sentences marked by agitated pauses and silences: ‘And I heard—him—it—this voice—other voices…Voices, voices—even the girl herself—now——’ (59). The problem of what and how we hear operates at two levels here. Marlow’s struggle to decipher what he has ‘heard’ is directly relayed to readers as a problem in how we decipher his chosen ‘snatches’. Do his pauses signify a persistent confusion, a willed determination to leave something unspoken, or a panic-stricken sense of the unspeakable?
    The fashioning of such glimpses into a sequential narrative has the constant effect of deferring any promise of full insight. So, at one point, Marlow with typical indirection peers through binoculars to catch sight of what appear to be carved balls stuck on posts or discovers a book with a mysterious cipher pencilled on its margins. Only later does it transpire, with an accompanying shock and need for readjustment on the observer’s part, that the objects are shrunken heads and that the cipher is a form of annotation in Russian made by The Harlequin. In the case of the discovered heads on sticks, a further trap awaits the reader, since one puzzle is solved only to generate another–when, that is, Marlow goes on to deem the heads to be ‘symbolic’ and adds that they were ‘expressive and puzzling…food for thought’ (71).
    The most extreme forms of expressive puzzle arrive with Marlow’s attempts to glimpse his own obscure motives. The causal logic of a narrative sequence usually depends upon the reader’s more or less clear perception of human motive. But Marlow the aspiring narrative-maker is sometimes defeated by an inability to fathom even his own governing motives. No explanation is given for his desire to confront Kurtz in isolation (‘to this day I don’t know why I was so jealous of sharing with any one the peculiar blackness of that experience’ (80)) or why he wishes to visit the Intended (‘I had no clear perception of what it was I really wanted’ (91)) or whether he has acquired the correct papers of Kurtz to hand to her (‘I was not even sure whether he had given me the right bundle’ (94)). Such deferrals of meaning could not, it might be supposed, prolong indefinitely. Yet the tale’s ending tends to do just this when it returns to the point at which it began–with the narrator sitting among his friends aboard a boat on the River Thames–and implies that the end is but a beginning to another telling.
    V
    â€˜Come and find out’ (15). The African jungle’s teasing invitation to Marlow is also projected to the story’s readers with the implication that, even with a full command of the evidence it has to offer, they will need to read inferentially and conjecturally. The history of Heart of Darkness criticism vividly indicates how the invitation has been taken up by successive generations and how, in the process, the work has undergone constant renewal.
    The responses of late-Victorian readers bear little