Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness
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Moored in the Thames, a sailor named Marlow tells the story of a river in Africa: the company that hired him, the stations along the way, and the agent upcountry whose name everyone says with reverence and lowered voices. What he finds when he reaches Kurtz has been read ever since as the sharpest account of what empire did to the people doing it.
About the book
Published in 1899, Heart of Darkness is told by Marlow to four men on a yawl moored in the Thames, waiting for the tide. He describes taking a job with a Belgian trading company, travelling out to a river station where machinery rusts in the grass and men die of boredom and fever, and spending months repairing a steamer in order to go upstream after an agent named Kurtz — the company’s best producer of ivory, whose methods have become the subject of nervous remarks. Conrad had commanded such a steamer on the Congo in 1890 and never recovered his health. The novella is the most quoted account of what colonial extraction did to the people carrying it out, and it has also been challenged for a century over what it does with the Africans in it — most famously by Chinua Achebe. Both readings are live, and the book sustains the argument.
Characters
Charles Marlow — Narrator
A steamer captain telling the story years later, unable to leave it alone and unwilling to explain it.
Kurtz — The agent
The company’s most successful ivory trader, spoken of with awe long before he is seen.
The manager — Company official
The station chief whose only talent is outlasting other men, and who is in no hurry to reach Kurtz.
The Russian — Trader
A young wanderer in patched motley who has attached himself to Kurtz and will hear nothing against him.
The Intended — Kurtz’s fiancée
Waiting in Brussels a year after his death, and asking Marlow the one question he answers with a lie.
The African woman — At the inner station
A magnificent, silent figure on the bank who stretches out her arms as the steamer leaves.
The helmsman — Crew
The steamer’s helmsman, killed in the attack below the station, whose death Marlow cannot get past.
About the author
Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in Russian-ruled Ukraine, the son of Polish nationalists who were exiled for it and died of it before he was twelve. He went to sea at sixteen, spent twenty years in the French and British merchant marine and qualified as a master mariner, and only then began to write — in English, his third language, which he had learned in his twenties and always spoke with an accent nobody could place. The command of a Congo river steamer in 1890 broke his health and produced Heart of Darkness. His novels include Lord Jim, Nostromo and The Secret Agent.