Throughout Heart of Darkness, Conrad's patterns in the use of colour and the meanings conveyed by certain colours help the reader interpret a deeper understanding of the novella. Colours such as white, black, yellow and blue are used in this way as well as the opposition of light and dark. Light and dark are also used the same way as colours in Heart of Darkness.
The colour white has a reverse meaning in the novella to the traditional meaning of innocence and purity. Conrad reverses the reader's expectation by describing the city Brussels as a "whited sepulchre". A whited sepulchre is a building which is painted white, but on the inside it is a tomb. When this is related to a city, it implies falsehood and hypocrisy. By describing Brussels as the "sepulchral city", the reader is positioned to question the truth of Marlow's business in the city, which is to get a job to travel to the Belgium "freestate", the Congo. The reader also questions the intentions of the colonisation of the Belgium "freestate", as Brussels and Belgium are positioned as hypocritical and false. .
Another reverse meaning of the colour white is the description of the fog, on page 41. "When the sun rose there was a white fog, very warm and clammy, and more blinding than the night". The white fog is suffocating and preventing Marlow from continuing his journey down the Congo. The white fog is "more blinding than the night", which itself had created a "dumb immobility sat on the banks". As the dark stopped Marlow from continuing his journey, and the white fog prevented him even more so, the colour white in this example is also the opposite of the traditional meaning, as it has prevented Marlow from continuing forward. This positions the reader to see white as a barrier to pass.
Another important aspect of the colour white in Heart of Darkness is that white is not used to describe anything after the "white fog", until Marlow visits the intended.
