This has two effects: it brings us closer to Marlow’s own experience (we learn things as we go along, just as he did at the time), but it also makes us work harder as readers, since we are encouraged to appraise carefully everything we are told. He makes us wait until the point in the narrative when he found out his mistake before he corrects it. He – and we – later find out that it’s not written in code, but Russian. A good example is the moment when Marlow comes upon the abandoned hut in the jungle, and finds a strange book on the ground which contains notes pencilled in the margins which, he tells us, appear to be written in cipher, or code. It’s as if you were there, and as confused and bewildered by it all as the narrator himself was.
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