Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness is Joseph Conrad’s short novel about a voyage up a great African river, told by the seaman Charles Marlow. First published in 1899, it is widely read as a critique of European colonialism and as a study of power and moral collapse.

The story opens on a yacht anchored in the Thames at dusk. As the light fades over London, Marlow remarks that this place too “has been one of the dark places of the earth”, and begins to tell his listeners about the time he went to Africa.

Through his aunt’s connections, Marlow is hired by a Belgian trading company to captain a river steamer. Conrad never names the river or the country, but at the time he wrote, the Congo Free State was the private colony of King Leopold II of Belgium, and Conrad himself had served on a Congo steamer in 1890.

On the coast and at the company’s stations, Marlow sees waste, cruelty and absurdity: a French warship firing into the forest at an unseen enemy, abandoned machinery, and African workers chained, starved and dying. The company’s officials, interested only in ivory, are petty, jealous and idle.

At the Central Station Marlow finds his steamer sunk and waits months for rivets to repair it. The station manager, who seems to have no talent except staying healthy, distrusts Kurtz and may welcome his failure. Marlow begins to suspect that the company’s talk of progress covers simple greed.

Again and again Marlow hears of Mr Kurtz, the company’s most successful agent, who runs a station deep in the interior and sends back more ivory than all the rest. Kurtz is spoken of as a remarkable man, an emissary of progress. Marlow becomes fascinated by him before they ever meet.

The journey upriver is slow and dreamlike. The steamer has to be repaired, the forest closes in, and the boat is attacked from the banks. When Marlow at last reaches the inner station, he finds that Kurtz has set himself up as a kind of god among the local people, and that heads on stakes surround his house.

Kurtz is gravely ill. Marlow takes him aboard for the voyage back, and hears him speak of his plans and his pride. Kurtz dies on the steamer, and his last words are “The horror! The horror!”

Back in Europe, Marlow visits Kurtz’s fiancée, the Intended, who still believes in his goodness. When she asks for his last words, Marlow cannot bring himself to tell her, and says instead that the last word Kurtz spoke was her name.