The narrative plot of Heart of Darkness is presented by an unnamed and undefined speaker, who is part of a group of men, former sailors, now professionals, probably middle-aged, on the deck of a yacht at the mouth of the Thames, LondonEngland. The era is probably contemporary with the writing and publication of the novel, therefore around the end of the 20th century. One of the group, Charlie Marlow, a mysterious figure still a sailor, recounts something that had happened to him several years earlier, when he was driving a steamboat along a river in Africa to track down an agent of a Belgian company involved in the promising ivory trade. Most of the novel is narrated by Marlow, although Conrad sometimes takes us back to the yacht and ends the novel there. Furthermore, as in Wuthering Heights, the technique of narrative framing raises questions of memory: how a story is reliable when told by someone many years after the fact, then reported by someone else. The structure of Heart of Darkness is very similar to that of the Russian nest. dolls, where you open each doll and inside is another doll. Much of the meaning of Heart of Darkness is found not in the center of the book, in the heart of Africa, but on the periphery of the book. There is an external narrator who tells us a story he heard from Marlow. The story Marlow tells seems to center on a man named Kurtz. However, most of what Marlow knows about Kurtz, he learned from other people, many of whom have good reasons not to be truthful with Marlow. Therefore Marlow must reconstruct much of Kurtz's story. We slowly get to know Kurtz more and more. Part of the meaning of Heart of Darkness is that we learn about "reality" through other people's tales, many of which are, themselves, twice-told tales. Marlow is the source of our story, but he is also a character within the story we read. Marlow, thirty-two years old, has always "followed the sea", as the novel says. His trip down the Congo River, however, is his first freshwater travel experience. Conrad uses Marlow as a narrator to enter the story himself and tell it with his own philosophical mind. When Marlowar arrives at the station he is shocked and disgusted by the sight of wasted human lives and ruined supplies. The manager's senseless cruelty and stupidity overwhelm him with anger and disgust. He wishes to see Kurtz, a very successful ivory agent hated by the company manager. Marlow distances himself further and further from the whites.