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Heart of Darkness
by Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness (1899) is a novella by Polish-English novelist Joseph Conrad about a narrated voyage up the Congo River into the Congo Free State in the Heart of Africa. Charles Marlow, the narrator, tells his story to friends aboard a boat anchored on the River Thames.
https://wjccschools.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/02/Heart_of_Darkness-1.pdf
Joseph Conrad’s short novel Heart of Darkness
is widely considered one of the richest examples
of the use of symbolism in modern literature.
Though the story is a mere fraction of a normal
novel’s length, Conrad’s dense, layered prose
can make for a slow and potentially frustrating—though ultimately rewarding—reading
experience. The main story is centered on a riverboat pilot named Marlow who signs on to work
for a Belgian company making inroads into the
African Congo. Once he reaches Africa,
Marlow’s piloting job transforms into a quest
to locate a mysterious company employee
named Kurtz who has all but vanished into the
African jungle. Marlow’s journey is a nightmarish trip through land he does not understand,
where his European cohorts operate without the
influence of laws or ‘‘civilized’’ society
Audio book
(Each part is about an hour)
https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/99/heart-of-darkness/1688/part-1/
https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/99/heart-of-darkness/1689/part-2/
https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/99/heart-of-darkness/1690/part-3/
https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/heart-of-darkness/
Part 1
Heart of Darkness opens aboard the ship Nellie
on the Thames River in London at dusk. Five
longtime friends have gathered on the boat,
though only one is mentioned by name:
Marlow. The other men are referred to by their
current occupation, such as the Lawyer and the
Accountant. All were once seamen, but Marlow
is the only one who remains a sailor. Like all
sailors, Marlow shows a ‘‘propensity to spin
yarns.’’ At dusk, as the sun falls into a patch of
brooding clouds in the west, the unnamed narrator ponders the centuries of great ships and
great men the river has seen during the glorious
expansion of the British Empire.
Suddenly, Marlow begins to speak of the
region’s earlier, darker history. He imagines
how desolate and wild the region must have
seemed to the first Romans who claimed the
land as part of their empire two thousand years
before. Although the area now holds the most important city in England—and arguably all
Europe—Marlow is quick to point out that
they ‘‘live in the flicker,’’ implying that darkness
can return at any time. Marlow then tells of his
own experience with darkness—similar to the
first Romans, but in Africa.
Since his story
makes up the bulk of the rest of the book,
Marlow acts as a narrator to the reader and to
his friends aboard the Nellie.
Having recently returned from several years
in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, Marlow tries to
keep himself busy in London. He becomes restless, though, and calls upon his relatives in continental Europe to help him secure a position
piloting a boat along the Congo River in Africa.
His family’s influence, and the fact that a Belgian
company has just lost a boat captain in the
Congo due to an argument with a native chief,
lands Marlow an immediate appointment.
Marlow travels to Belgium to sign the employment contract, noting that the city from which
the Company operates looks to him like ‘‘a
whited sepulcher,’’ or burial vault. The contract
is signed, and a French doctor examines Marlow
to affirm his health for the trip. He bids farewell
to his aunt and heads to Africa aboard a French
steamer.
Long before reaching his port, Marlow
encounters the African coastline, made seemingly impenetrable by ‘‘a colossal jungle, so
dark-green as to be almost black,’’ and extending
as far as he can see. The steamer passes numerous ragged outposts, as well as a warship firing
its cannons into the dense jungle for what
appears to be no reason. A member of the crew
informs Marlow that there is ‘‘a camp of
natives—he called them enemies!—hidden out
of sight somewhere.’’
Marlow finally reaches the mouth of the
Congo River after a month of travel. He boards
another vessel and continues up the river since
he is to be stationed more than two hundred
miles from the coast. The captain of the boat, a
Swede, tells Marlow of a recent passenger who
had hanged himself for no known reason.
Marlow is deposited thirty miles upriver at one
of the Company’s stations to await further passage. The station is a ‘‘scene of inhabited devastation,’’ riddled with broken-down machines and apparently pointless excavations. Marlow
sees a group of black men chained together—
judged by the colonists to be criminals—carrying
baskets of dirt. Marlow ducks into a stand of
trees for shade and finds himself among a group
of black men on the verge of death, each too ill or
weak to continue working. He offers one a biscuit from his pocket and then leaves the men to
their suffering.
Continuing on, Marlow encounters the
Company’s chief accountant, an astonishingly
well-dressed man who is to be the first to mention a name Marlow will come to know well:
Kurtz. The accountant comments that Marlow
is bound to meet the fellow Company agent
when he travels upriver. According to the
accountant, Kurtz is not only ‘‘a very remarkable person,’’ but also brings in more ivory for
the Company than all other traders put together.
Ten days later, Marlow leaves camp with a
large caravan to begin the two-hundred-mile,
two-week trek to the Central Station. When he
arrives, Marlow is told the boat he was meant to
pilot has sunk. It is now his job to reclaim the
boat and fix it. The general manager of the station, an anxious man who seems concerned
about Kurtz’s well-being at an outpost farther
inland, asks Marlow how long it will take to
repair the ship and head-on. Marlow estimates
that it will take a few months and quickly sets
to work.
Marlow notices that, other than himself,
none of the employees at the camp appears to
do anything productive. They spend their time
talking about ivory and devising plots and
schemes against each other that are never
enacted. Marlow becomes acquainted with
another Company agent, a brick-maker who
has not made any bricks because of the absence
of some key components never specified. The
brick-maker is very interested in Marlow and
his connections back in Europe, but Marlow is
interested only in repairing his ship and learning
about Kurtz. The brick-maker tells Marlow that
Kurtz is ‘‘a prodigy’’ and accuses Marlow of
being from the same ‘‘gang’’ as Kurtz—a gang
that is destined to assume control of the Central
Station in due time.
After beginning his work on the boat,
Marlow realizes he will need rivets ordered to
finish his repairs. There are no rivets to be found
in Central Station, yet he had seen piles and cases
of them back at the station he had only recently
left. Marlow muses, ‘‘Three carriers could have
brought all that was wanted to set that steamboat afloat.’’ Marlow asks the brick-maker, who
maintains a close relationship with the general
manager, to make sure he gets rivets. In the
meantime, the general manager’s uncle emerges
from the jungle. He is the leader of the Eldorado
Exploring Expedition, a secretive group whose
only goal seems to be to ‘‘tear treasure out of the
bowels of the land’’—in Marlow’s view, a calling
no higher than ‘‘burglars breaking into a safe.’’
Part 2
One night, as Marlow falls in and out of sleep on
the deck of his sidelined steamer, he hears two
men below him in conversation. It is the general
manager and his uncle, discussing Kurtz in less
than glowing terms. The manager dislikes Kurtz
for his brazen lack of respect and fears Kurtz is
plotting to take over his position. The uncle tells
the manager that Kurtz—or another unnamed
‘‘pestilential fellow’’ thought to be in the district
with Kurtz—should be hanged to serve as an
example. The manager speaks contemptuously
of Kurtz’s notion that the stations should not
only be for trade, but also for ‘‘humanizing,
improving, instructing.’’ Marlow leaps to his
feet and startles the two men, who then try to
slip away coolly. A few days later, the uncle
departs camp with the Eldorado Exploring
Expedition. Much later, Marlow hears news
that all of the expedition’s donkeys have died.
He reports dryly, ‘‘I know nothing as to the fate
of the less valuable animals,’’ meaning the uncle
and his fellow explorers.
Marlow finishes repairing his boat; accompanied by the manager, a few pilgrims from the
Central Station, and a crew of natives, he sails up
the Congo toward Kurtz’s camp. Marlow compares journeying upriver to ‘‘traveling back to the
earliest beginnings of the world,’’ a place of stillness but not peace. Marlow describes it as ‘‘the
stillness of an implacable force brooding over an
inscrutable intention.’’ The journey takes two
months, though Marlow keeps busy with the
many challenges of navigating an unfamiliar
river. His crew of natives, referred to as cannibals
though they are never seen to eat people, prove to
be hard workers. Marlow is especially fond of the
fireman, who looks after the boiler that provides
the boat’s steam power. Marlow calls him ‘‘an
improved specimen,’’ but also compares the man
to ‘‘a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather
hat, walking on his hind legs.’’
Fifty miles from Kurtz and his Inner
Station, the boat reaches a hut with a stack of
cut wood intended for them and a note warning
the travelers to approach the station with caution. In the hut, Marlow finds a well-worn
book devoted to various trivial matters of
seamanship. He finds notes in the margins left
by the previous owner, apparently written in
some kind of code. He takes the book with him
to serve as a diversion from the gloom of the
enveloping jungle.
A few days later, with the boat within ten
miles of the Inner Station, they become trapped
in blinding fog and must stop. While waiting for
the fog to lift, they hear a human cry from somewhere nearby. The pilgrims on board fear an
attack by the local natives, but Marlow thinks
the impenetrable fog will protect them. The fog
eventually lifts and they continue, approaching
within a mile and a half of Kurtz’s Inner Station.
There, the river is split by a shallow sandbank
that forces Marlow to steer the boat close to
shore.
At that moment, a flurry of arrows rains
down upon the boat from the shore. The pilgrims blindly fire back with their guns. The
native helmsman of the boat, also trying to
return fire, is hit with a spear. Marlow blows
the boat’s steam whistle, and the attackers flee.
The helmsman dies, leaving a pool of blood in
the pilothouse that soaks Marlow’s shoes.
Marlow removes his shoes and tosses them into
the river. The surprise attack leaves Marlow
convinced that in a region of such violence,
Kurtz must be dead. This thought fills Marlow
with loneliness, even though he has never met the
man. Marlow puts on dry slippers, pulls the dead
helmsman’s body out of the pilothouse, and
throws him overboard to prevent the cannibals
from eating him.
At last, they reach the Inner Station. On the
shore, a young Russian man dressed in colorfully patched clothing, ‘‘like a harlequin,’’ greets
them. He already knows of the attack on the
boat but tells them that everything is fine now.
The manager and the pilgrims go to meet Kurtz.
Marlow stays behind with the Russian and
learns that he was the one who left the stack of
wood at the hut downriver. Marlow shows him
the book he took from the hut, and the Russian
thanks him for returning it. Marlow realizes that
the notes in the margin are not written in code but in Russian. Marlow also learns from the
Russian why his boat was attacked: the natives
do not want the white men to take Kurtz away
from them.
Part 3
The Russian tells Marlow how he came to meet
Kurtz and how Kurtz immediately captured his
devotion. He also mentions that Kurtz enlisted
the local tribe to help him acquire ivory—not
through trade, but through violence. Kurtz, for
all his lofty ideas, seems obsessed with obtaining
ivory. Once, he even threatened to kill the
Russian over a small piece of ivory the man
received as a gift from a local chief. Even after
this, the Russian remains as close to Kurtz as
anyone can; he even cared for the man when he
became ill. This time, however, Kurtz’s illness is
grave enough to demand more serious treatment.
Through his binoculars, Marlow surveys the
hilltop house where Kurtz rests. He is shocked to
find the surrounding fence posts topped by the
decapitated heads of natives. The Russian
defends Kurtz, claiming that these are the
heads of rebels. Marlow notes, ‘‘Those rebellious
heads looked very subdued to me on their
sticks.’’ Kurtz is brought from the house on a
makeshift stretcher. Tribesmen swarm out from
the jungle, surrounding the stretcher and its carriers. Kurtz sits up and shouts something that
Marlow cannot hear, and the natives clear out.
The men carrying Kurtz place him in a small
cabin on the boat. Suddenly, an exquisitely decorated native woman appears on the shore next to
the steamer; she stares intently at the men on
board, then walks away. The Russian says that
if she had tried to board the ship he would have
tried to shoot her and that she was acquainted
with Kurtz.
Inside Kurtz’s cabin, Marlow hears Kurtz
arguing with the manager. Kurtz insists that the
manager has not come to save him but to save
the ivory. He also insists that he is not so ill that
he should be removed from his station. The
manager steps out of the cabin and complains
to Marlow that Kurtz has ruined the region for
the Company, doing far more harm than good.
The Russian tells Marlow that he trusts him
to look after Kurtz and will take his leave. He
also informs Marlow that it was Kurtz who
ordered the natives to attack the steamboat as
they approached. Kurtz had hoped to scare the
manager and his men and send them back to
Central Station thinking he must already be dead. Marlow gives the Russian gun cartridges,
tobacco, and a pair of shoes, and the colorfully the dressed man disappears into the night.
After midnight, Marlow is awakened by
drumming and a burst of ritualistic cries. He
checks Kurtz’s cabin and discovers him missing.
Marlow goes ashore and heads toward the
drumming in search of Kurtz. Just thirty yards
from the closest native fire, he catches up to
Kurtz, crawling toward it like a man under the
spell of great magic. Kurtz warns him to go
away. Marlow first threatens Kurtz and then
flatters him in an attempt to get him back to
the boat. Kurtz speaks of his grand plans and
the manager’s attempts to ruin him, but much to
Marlow’s relief, Kurtz returns to the boat.
The steamer departs at noon the next day,
and a thousand natives line the shore to watch
the ‘‘splashing, thumping, fierce river-demon
beating the water with its terrible tail and breathing black smoke into the air’’ as it carries Kurtz
away. Kurtz is moved into the pilothouse, which
is better ventilated than his previous cabin. The
native woman appears along the shore, and the
entire tribe lets loose a chorus of cries. The pilgrims aboard the ship ready their guns, so
Marlow blasts the steam whistle to disperse the
natives before the pilgrims can start trouble.
Traveling with the river’s current, their pace
away from Kurtz’s camp is twice as fast as it was
on their trip there, but Kurtz’s condition quickly
worsens. The ship breaks down and must stop
for repairs. Kurtz, sensing his end might be near,
gives Marlow his personal papers and a photograph of his intended bride back in Europe. One
night, when Marlow checks in on him, Kurtz
tells him he is waiting to die. Marlow dismisses
the remark, but Kurtz, seemingly lost in some
vision, softly cries, ‘‘The horror! The horror!’’
Marlow leaves him alone and joins the other
pilgrims in the mess room for dinner. Soon
after, the manager’s assistant enters and informs
them that Kurtz is dead. The pilgrims rush to
see, but Marlow stays in the mess room. The
pilgrims bury Kurtz the next day in a muddy
hole.
Marlow keeps Kurtz’s documents with him
all the way back to Europe, despite the manager’s attempts to confiscate them as property
of the Company. He meets with several people,
including Kurtz’s cousin—to whom he gives
some of Kurtz’s family letters—and a journalist
who considers himself one of Kurtz’s colleagues.
The journalist remarks that Kurtz would have
made a great leader for an extremist political
party. When Marlow asks which party, the journalist responds, ‘‘Any party.’’ Marlow gives the
man one of Kurtz’s reports intended for publication, and the journalist departs, satisfied.
The last of Kurtz’s belongings are meant for
his fiancee, and Marlow visits her to deliver
them. Although by this time it has been a full
year since Kurtz’s death, she still wears black
and appears to be in mourning. The two discuss
Kurtz’s best qualities, and his intended bride
calls his death a loss to all the world. The
woman begs Marlow to tell her Kurtz’s last
words. Knowing she seeks comfort more than
truth, Marlow lies and says, ‘‘The last word he
pronounced was—your name.’’ The woman
breaks down, claiming that she knew this all
along.
Marlow ends his tale. The narrator looks
out over the Thames, which, under a dark and
foreboding sky appears to flow ‘‘into the heart
of an immense darkness.’’
