Heart Of Darkness By Joseph Conrad – Overview

In 1890, Joseph Conrad, an officer aboard the Roi des Belges, sailed up the River Congo into the hinterland of the Congo Free State, in effect the private fiefdom zugrav01 of King Leopold of Belgium. Eight years later, just as particulars of Leopold's genocidal regime began to grow to be public, Conrad's experiences there inspired him to write down Heart of Darkness, as powerful a condemnation of imperialism as has ever been written, and nonetheless a deeply unsettling read more than a century on.

The novella centres on the efforts of Marlow, Conrad's alter ego, to travel up an unnamed African river on behalf of his employer with the intention to convey back a rogue ivory trader, Mr Kurtz. Kurtz's status precedes him: "He's a prodigy… an emissary of pity and science and progress." But as Marlow gets nearer to Kurtz, there may be the rising suggestion that he has not directly become corrupted and descended into savagery.


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The additional upstream Marlow gets, the more intense the sense of impending hazard, with cryptic warnings and a bloody ambush ratcheting up the tension. When Marlow lastly reaches Kurtz's camp, he discovers a scene of unimaginable depravity. The dying Kurtz is taken aboard the boat (together with a prodigious quantity of ivory), but he doesn't survive the journey back downstream. With Marlow current, his chilling last words are "The horror! The horror!"

It's tempting to see Heart of Darkness as a masterfully constructed parable on human nature (witness Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola's film adaptation, in which the motion was transposed to south-east Asia) but as historian Adam Hochschild has pointed out in King Leopold's Ghost, concerning the king's rape of the Congo, Conrad himself was fairly clear that it was based mostly on specific occasions he had witnessed, saying it was "experience… pushed a bit (and only very little) beyond the precise info of the case". Despite his professionaltestations, this is undeniably an invaluable historical document offering a glimpse into the horrific human consequences of the imperial powers' scramble for Africa as much as it's a compelling tale.

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