HEART OF

DARKNESS

BY JOSEPH CONRAD

This Photo by Unknown author is licensed under CC BY-SA-NC.

ABOUT  THE AUTHOR

Born: in Berdichev (formerly Poland), Ukraine on December 03,

1857

Died: August 03, 1924

Joseph Conrad (born Józef Teodor Konrad

Korzeniowski ) was a Polish-born English novelist
Regarded as one of the best novelists, Joseph Conrad
wrote short stories and novels like Lord Jim, Heart of
Darkness and The Secret Agent, which combined his
experiences in remote places with an interest in moral
conflict and the dark side of human nature.
KEY FACTS ABOUT HEART OF DARKNESS

PUBLISHED: 1899

LITERARY PERIOD: VICTORIANISM/MODERNISM

GENRE: COLONIAL LITERATURE; QUEST

LITERATURE

SETTING: THE NARRATOR  TELLS THE STORY

FROM A SHIP AT THE MOUTH OF THE THAMES
RIVER NEAR LONDON, ENGLAND AROUND 1899.
HIS STORY TAKES READERS TO CONGO OF
LATE  19TH CENTURY.

POINT OF VIEW: FIRST PERSON (BOTH MARLOW AND

THE UNNAMED NARRATOR USE FIRST PERSON)

NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE: FRAME TALE

HISTORICAL • Imperialism
• History of Belgian Congo
CONTEXT • Racial prejudice
• exploitation
HEART OF DARKNESS PRIMARILY TAKES
PLACE IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY
IN THE BELGIAN-CONTROLLED CONGO FREE
STATE.
• Between 1885 and 1908, Leopold II of the Belgians
was the de facto owner of Congo Free State.
• Leopold’s greed had wrought: exploitation, mass-
mutilations, state-sponsored slavery and murder,
genocide.
• Ivory trade became the cause of pain and suffering
under his regime.
• He gave up absolute rule over Congo in 1908.
CONGO IN HEART OF
DARKNESS
• Marlow's journey takes places along the snake
shaped Congo river in Africa. The racial prejudices,
torment and suffering under the Leopold regime
become the underlying plot of the novel.
•  The Congo river symbolizes movement and helps the
characters and the plot keep going forward.
TITLE: HEART OF DARKNESS

• The title Heart of Darkness is significant because

it alludes to both the physical darkness and moral
darkness.
• The darkness refers to the dark civilization of
Africa and Heart symbolizes the very core of the
African nation.
• Symbolically the title deals with the unexplored
story and history of civil and uncivil spirit in nature
and human heart
MAJOR CHARACTERS
• Marlow: The protaganist and one of the five men on the ship in the Thames. Heart of Darkness is
mostly made up of his story about his journey into the Belgian Congo. He is philosophical,
passionate, and insightful but also extremely skeptical of both mankind and civilization.
• Kurtz:  an ivory trader for the Company. Kurtz works out of the Inner Station and is remarkably
effective at acquiring ivory. A well-educated European, he is described as a "universal genius" and
begins his work in the Congo as part of a virtuous mission.
• Narrator: One of the five men on the ship in the Thames, he is the one who relays to the
reader Marlow's story about Kurtz and the Congo.
•The General Manager : The head of the Company's Central Station on the river. the General Manager has reached
his position of power in the Company because of his ability to cause vague uneasiness in others coupled with an
ability to withstand the terrible jungle diseases year after year. The General Manager has no lofty moral ambitions,
and cares only about his own power and position and making money.

•The Accountant: Also working out of the Central Station, the Accountant who wears spotless clothes that stand in
contrast to the death and decay around him. He is a microcosm of imperialistic hypocrisy.

•The Brickmaker Although his name suggests the nature of his position, the Brickmaker does not make any bricks
because of a shortage of materials. When Marlow meets the Brickmaker at the Central Station, Marlow suspects
that he is "pumping" him for information about the Company's plans.
• Kurtz's Intended
• The woman in Europe to whom Kurtz is betrothed to be married. She is incredibly idealistic about
both Kurtz and the colonization of Africa. She continues to mourn Kurtz as a great man even a year
after he dies.
• Marlow's Aunt
• A well-connected and idealistic woman, she helps Marlow get the job as a steamer pilot for the
Company. She is extremely idealistic about the European colonization of Africa, seeing it as a
beautiful effort to civilize the savages.
 PART ONE : THE BEGINNING

As Heart of Darkness opens,The Narrator describes the scene

from the deck of a ship named Nellie, waiting on Thames
River. The five people onboard are the Director of Companies,
the Lawyer, the Accountant, Charlie Marlow and an unnamed
narrator of the story, whose words begin and end the novella
and thus frame Marlow's tale. 
•Marlow tells the story of how he applied for a position made
vacant when a captain named Fresleven is killed by the native
people and how he later encounters the corpse of the man in the
jungle, unburied but surrounded by grass high enough to hide
his bones. 
•Marlow arrives at the Company offices and finds two women
knitting with black wool and looking at him with downcast
eyes. He is  examined by a doctor who tells him that it would be
interesting for science to watch the mental changes that take
place in people "out there."
JOURNEY TO THE OUTER
STATION
• Marlow leaves for Africa on a French steamer that stops
at ports along the African coast.
• He sees a forced-labor camp where black men, who are
chained together, build a railway.  Marlow observes that
they seem to be dying of disease and starvation.
• As Marlow nears the Outer Station's buildings, he
encounters a white man—the Company's chief
accountant—who is full of life and elegance. The
accountant is the first person to tell Marlow about Kurtz,
describing him as a "first-class agent"
CENTRAL STATION
• Three events of singnificance take place in this episode.
1. Marlow learns that the paddle-wheeled steamboat he is
meant to pilot to the Inner Station is lying at the bottom of
the river. 
2. Marlow meets with the general manager of the Central
Station—a man who inspires uneasiness.
3. Marlow has a long conversation with the brickmaker.When
Marlow asks the brickmaker about Kurtz, the brickmaker
gives a glowing report: "He is a prodigy," the brickmaker
explains, "an emissary of pity and science and progress,
and devil know what else."
By the end of this episode, the Eldorado Exploring Expedition
arrives, headed by station manager's uncle and Marlow
overhears them complaining about Kurtz. after a while, they leave
to explore, Marlow never hears from them again.
    PART 2: JOURNEY  TO THE INNER STATION 

•Marlow begins his journey towards the inner station and

on his way, 
• Picks up natives/cannibals to assist with pushing the
steamer
• About 50 miles short of the Inner Station, the crew
comes upon a reed hut and there they find a pile of
wood and a book called "An Inquiry into Some Points
of Seamanship"
• About 8 miles from the inner station, a heavy fog sets
in and  only 10 feet  from the bank, the steamer is
attacked.
• Marlow's helmsman is killed in this attack but his
main concern remains Kurtz's whereabouts.
PART 3: AT  THE INNER STATION

At the inner station, 

• Marlow meet a Russian man dressed as harlequin 
• Marlow calls the harlequin's "very existence"
improbable and inexplicable.
• The Russian tells Marlow how he loves to sit and listen
to Kurtz expound on every imaginable topic.
• Through the Russian's account, Marlow concludes that
Kurtz has become unhinged: "Evidently," decides
Marlow, "the appetite for more ivory had gotten the
better of the ... less material aspirations." 
ENCOUNTERING KURTZ
• Kurtz arrives on a stretcher. He was ill, but his voice
was strong.
• Warriors appeared from the jungle carrying weapons,
and the Russian said that all Kurtz has to do is give the
order and all the whites will die.
• On the shore, Marlow sees a woman, dressed
beautifully in native clothes and jewelry. Marlow
describes her as "savage and superb ... ominous and
stately."
• Marlow looks into the Kurtz's cabin that night but he
was gone. He sees a trail and realizes that Kurtz, unable
to walk, is crawling into the jungle, drawn by the
"heavy, mute spell of the wilderness." Marlow finds
him and helps him back to the station.
 RETURN DOWNRIVER AND KURTZ'S DEATH

• At noon the next day, Marlow pilots the steamer away from

the station while more than a thousand native people watch
the crew go, including the native woman.
• One evening Marlow notices a change in Kurtz's features.
On his face is a mixture of pride, power, terror, and despair.
He cries out, "The horror! The horror!" As he nears his
death. Marlow leaves him there. A moment later the
manager's "boy" comes in and says, "Mistah Kurtz—he
dead." Marlow continues eating, feeling no need to see him
again. He calls Kurtz a "remarkable man who had
pronounced a judgment upon the adventures of his soul on
this earth." The next day the pilgrims bury Kurtz's body.
RETURN  TO BRUSSELS AND MEETING KURTZ'S
INTENDED

• He returns to Brussels and takes with him Kurtz's

report, Kurtz's letters, and the photograph Kurtz asks him to
protect. 
• He hands over his reports to his jouranlist friend.
• In the year following Kurtz's death, Marlow decides to return
his letters and the photograph to Kurtz's "Intended"—his
fiancée.
• He visits the Intended who is dressed in black for mourning.
She speaks highly of Kurtz and of the great loss she and the
world now suffer. She asks Marlow to tell her Kurtz's dying
words, and Marlow lies. He tells her that Kurtz's last words
were her name.
THE END
In the novella's final movement, the small
group of Marlow's listeners are still waiting on
the Thames for the river's current to change.
Marlow sits quietly. The others are silent too.
The river, the original narrator says in closing
the novella, "seemed to lead into the heart of
an immense darkness."
THEMES AND SYMBOLS IN HEART OF DARKNESS

Racism
Heart of Darkness echoes the racism of the time, and racism becomes a primary theme of
the novella.Other than the blatant racial violence in the work, there are more underlying
notes.
Some critics argue that Conrad was not racist but that, through his racist character, Marlow,
he reveals the racist viewpoints of Company agents and of imperialism more broadly.
Others, including the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe disagree. Achebe argues that, because
Conrad rarely provides native characters with speech or other human traits, he—the writer
—does not view Africans as human. 
Colonialism
 In Europe, colonization of Africa was justified on the grounds that not only would it
bring wealth to Europe, it would also civilize and educate the "savage" African
natives. Heart of Darkness shows that in practice the European colonizers used the
high ideals of colonization as a cover to allow them to viciously rip whatever wealth
they could from Africa.
Unlike most novels that focus on the evils of colonialism, Heart of Darkness's focus
on the white colonizers makes the novella somewhat unbalanced but it does
allow Heart of Darkness to extend its criticism of colonialism all the way back to its
corrupt source, the "civilization" of Europe.
Civilization versus Barbarism
Believing that they come from a more civilized culture, the agents of the Company
consistently behave in a barbaric manner. They believe they are more civilized than the
Africans Yet easily fall into savagery in uncivilized Africa.While Marlow presents
European brutality, he does not show the supposedly uncivilized Africans as particularly
brutal.The steamer's crew, whom Marlow says are cannibals, want to eat the body of the
dead helmsman, but Marlow doesn't really criticize them for that. He recognizes that they
are starving. Though the followers at the station seem threatening, they don't do anything
to harm Marlow or the other white people on the steamer. Who, then, is civilized, and
who is barbarous?
SYMBOLS
Dark Wool
The knitting of dark wool by two women at the Company
office in Brussels reinforces the symbol of darkness in the
novella. The women are the knitters of funeral shrouds, used
in death, the ultimate darkness. .
In A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens Madame
Defarge secretly uses her knitting to weave into cloth the
names of people to be killed. The convention relates back to
Greek mythology, in which the Fates use thread to measure
the length of a person's life, cutting it when it is time to die.
However, in Greek mythology there are three Fates, who
represent birth, life, and death. In Conrad's scene there are
but two, representing, presumably, life and death
Women
Both Kurtz’s Intended And His African Mistress Function
As Blank Slates Upon Which The Values And The Wealth
Of Their Respective Societies Can Be Displayed. Marlow
Frequently Claims That Women Are The Keepers Of
Naïve Illusions; Although This Sounds Condemnatory,
Such A Role Is In Fact Crucial, As These Naïve Illusions
Are At The Root Of The Social Fictions That Justify
Economic Enterprise And Colonial Expansion. In Return,
The Women Are The Beneficiaries Of Much Of The
Resulting Wealth, And They Become Objects Upon
Which Men Can Display Their Own Success And Status.
The River

The Congo River is the key to Africa for Europeans. It allows

them access to the center of the continent without having to
physically cross it; in other words, it allows the white man to
remain always separate or outside. Africa is thus reduced to a
series of two-dimensional scenes that flash by Marlow’s steamer
as he travels upriver. The river also seems to want to expel
Europeans from Africa altogether: its current makes travel
upriver slow and difficult, but the flow of water makes travel
downriver, back toward “civilization,” rapid and seemingly
inevitable. Marlow’s struggles with the river as he travels
upstream toward Kurtz reflect his struggles to understand the
situation in which he has found himself. The ease with which he
journeys back downstream, on the other hand, mirrors his
acquiescence to Kurtz and his “choice of nightmares.”
OTHER SYMBOLS
• Ivory: Ivory symbolizes the greed of the Europeans. It is a consuming passion for them, the lure that
draws them to Africa.  ivory is also equated with darkness and corruption
• Drums: The drums are the sound equivalent of the jungle—an aspect of the environment that is
mysterious, uncivilized, and both attractive and destructive.
• Dark and white:  Conventional idea of white as good and dark as evil don't really apply to Heart of
Darkness, Rather, whiteness, especially in the form of the white fog that surrounds the steamship,
symbolizes blindness. The dark is symbolized by the huge and inscrutable African jungle, and is associated
with the unknowable and primitive heart of all men.
• Harlequin: The harlequin's presence ironizes the tragedy of the situation and suggests another literary
convention: the wise fool, although the Russian seems more naive than wise.
CONCLUSION

Heart of darkness in its core is the story of man's inner most inclinations once he's
separated from civilization and freed from the shackles of morality. It displays man at
his worst once he has lost the fight against his "inner strength"