Question: Who are "Faithless Pilgrims" and what do they represent?
Ans. The whitemen at the Belgian Trading Company's station are called "faithless pilgrims" by Marlow. He uses the word pilgrims in an ironic sense. They have come to the Congo with a purportedly high moral purpose: to civilize the natives and improve their backward conditions of life. However, they are faithless to this purpose. Instead, they exploit the natives to gratify their own greed for ivory.
The pilgrims are the human prototype of "the great demoralization of the land of the Congo." Isolated from the restraints and consolations of a social order, they are totally devoid of aims or values. They have degenerated into greedy, hypocritical, and slothful phantoms, who seem always to be strolling "aimlessly in the sunshine of the yard," like hippos sunning themselves. The pilgrims are hollow inside and hence unwholesome.
Though usually armed to the teeth, the pilgrims have become cowardly and cruelly destructive, while retaining that most superficial and meaningless trait of civilization—perfect manners. Their hollowness is further emphasized by the staves they carry. Staves, traditionally symbolic of authority and power, become for the pilgrims a mere crutch, supporting their empty, mask-like appearance.
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