Perhaps, though, they are not bored with the story itself; they listen to the whole thing, after all. It could possibly be the teller of the tale that they have become overly accustomed to, as Conrad goes on to describe his aloof manner and "pose of a Buddha" that make the simple sailor seem to go out of his way to show off his hard-won enlightenment (1369-70). Despite Marlow's determination to boast of his experiences, it is perhaps most imperative to note that he honestly earned for himself a kind of "dark wisdom" in the Congo that was absent before his employment there (Graver 88), which is vital in giving full credit to the events that took place on that winding jungle river as life-changing forces in Marlow's life. Marlow himself refers to the whole episode as "the farthest point of navigation and the culminating point of my experience." And though there was much that he feared he would never understand about it all, he went on to say that "it seemed somehow to throw a light on everything about me "and into my thoughts" (Conrad 1370).
Prior to this, Marlow had already been a sailor for some number of years in the waters of the far East. Seemingly a happy-go-lucky sort, he managed to retain a sort of naveté about him even with this experience, and blindly jumps at the chance to explore the Congo for a trade company, not thinking twice about the fact that a position for employment opened up to him only because a former captain had been recently killed by natives. Quite the contrary, this made Marlow all the more excited (Conrad 1371). New insight is soon to come though, and Lawrence Graver depicts it well in "Marlow's Evolving Awareness": .
"At first he moves quickly through the company offices in Brussels, his exuberance checked only by a slowly-developing suspicion of the lunacy of his employers," whom he goes on to describe as "startling grotesques who staff the company offices [.