Almost a hundred years old, and familiar to generations of readers, Conrad’s little book has lost none of its

power to amaze and appal: it remains, in many places, an essential starting point for discussions of
modernism, imperialism, the hypocrisies and glories of the West, and the ambiguities of “civilization.”
Critics by the dozen have subjected it to symbolic, mythological, and psychoanalytic interpretation; T. S.
Eliot used a line from it as an epigraph for “The Hollow Men,” and Hemingway and Faulkner were much
impressed by it, as were Orson Welles and Francis Ford Coppola, who employed it as the ground plan for
his despairing epic of Americans in Vietnam, “Apocalypse Now.”
In recent years, however, Conrad—and particularly “Heart of Darkness”—has fallen under a cloud of
suspicion in the academy. In the curious language of the tribe, the book has become “a site of contestation.”
After all, Conrad offered a nineteenth-century European’s view of Africans as primitive. He attacked
Belgian imperialism and in the same breath seemed to praise the British variety. In 1975, the distinguished
Nigerian novelist and essayist Chinua Achebe assailed “Heart of Darkness” as racist and called for its
elimination from the canon of Western classics. And recently Edward W. Said, one of the most famous
critics and scholars at Columbia today, has been raising hostile and undermining questions about it.
Certainly, Said is no breaker of canons. But if Conrad were somehow discredited, one could hardly imagine
a more successful challenge to what the academic left has repeatedly deplored as the “hegemonic discourse”
of the classic Western texts. There is also the inescapable question of justice to Conrad himself.
Written in a little more than two months, the last of 1898 and the first of 1899, “Heart of Darkness” is both
the story of a journey and a kind of morbid fairy tale. Marlow, Conrad’s narrator and familiar alter ego, a
British merchant seaman of the eighteen-nineties, travels up the Congo in the service of a rapacious Belgian
trading company, hoping to retrieve the company’s brilliant representative and ivory trader, Mr. Kurtz, who
has mysteriously grown silent. The great Mr. Kurtz! In Africa, everyone gossips about him, envies him, and,
with rare exception, loathes him. The flower of European civilization (“all Europe contributed to the making
of Kurtz”), exemplar of light and compassion, journalist, artist, humanist, Kurtz has gone way upriver and at
times well into the jungle, abandoning himself to certain . . . practices. Rifle in hand, he has set himself up as
god or devil in ascendancy over the Africans. Conrad is notoriously vague about what Kurtz actually does,
but if you said “kills some people, has sex with others, steals all the ivory,” you would not, I believe, be far
wrong. In Kurtz, the alleged benevolence of colonialism has flowered into criminality. Marlow’s voyage
from Europe to Africa and then upriver to Kurtz’s Inner Station is a revelation of the squalors and disasters
of the colonial “mission”; it is also, in Marlow’s mind, a journey back to the beginning of creation, when
nature reigned exuberant and unrestrained, and a trip figuratively down as well, through the levels of the self
to repressed and unlawful desires. At death’s door, Marlow and Kurtz find each other.
Rereading a work of literature is often a shock, an encounter with an earlier self that has been revised by the
famous manner—the magnificent, alarmed, and throbbing excitement of Conrad’s laboriously mastered
English. Conrad was born in czarist-occupied Poland; though he heard English spoken as a boy and his
father translated Shakespeare, it was his third language, and his prose, now and then, betrays the propensity
for high intellectual melodrama and rhymed abstraction (“the fascination of the abomination”) characteristic
of his second language, French. Oh, inexorable, unutterable, unspeakable! The great British critic F. R.
Leavis, who loved Conrad, ridiculed such sentences as “It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding
over an inscrutable intention.” The sound, Leavis thought, was an overwrought, thrilled embrace of
strangeness.
Read in isolation, some of Conrad’s sentences are certainly a howl, but one reads them in isolation only in
criticism like Leavis’s or Achebe’s.
In one sense, the writing now seemed close to the movies: it revelled in sensation and atmosphere, in
extreme acts and grotesque violence however indirectly presented, in shivering enigmas and richly phrased
premonitions and frights. In other ways, though, “Heart of Darkness” was modernist at its most intellectually
bracing, with tonalities, entirely contemporary and distanced, there’s a mood of barely contained revolt; and
sardonic humour that verged on malevolence.
Out of sight of their countrymen back home, who continue to cloak the colonial mission in the language of
Christian charity and improvement, the “pilgrims” have become rapacious and cruel. The cannibals eating
hippo meat practice restraint; the Europeans do not.
“savagery” is inherent in all of us, including the most “civilized,” for we live, according to Conrad, in a brief
interlude between innumerable centuries of darkness and the darkness yet to come. Only the rivets,
desperately needed to repair Marlow’s pathetic steamboat, offer stability—the rivets and the ship itself and
the codes of seamanship and duty are all that hold life together in a time of moral anarchy. Marlow, meeting
Kurtz at last, despises him for letting go—and at the same time, with breath-taking ambivalence, admires
him for going all the way to the bottom of his soul and discovering there, at the point of death, a judgment of
his own life. Much dispute and occasional merriment have long attended the question of what, exactly,
Kurtz means by the melodramatic exclamation “The horror!” But surely one of the things he means is his
long revelling in “abominations”—is own internal collapse.
a reading of the novella that interrogated the Western civilization of which Kurtz is the supreme
representative and of which the students, in their youthful way, were representatives as well.
“We embody this knowledge, and the book asks, do we fall into the void—do we drown or come out with a
stronger sense of self?”
Does its existence redeem the male hegemonic line of culture? Does it redeem education in this tradition?”
By which I believe that he also meant to ask, “Could the existence of such a book redeem the crimes of
imperialism?”
Dante, whom Conrad, in one of his greatest moments, obviously had in mind. Marlow arrives at one of the
trading company’s stations, a disastrous ramshackle settlement of wrecked machinery and rusting rails, and
their encounters, under the trees, dozens of exhausted African workers who have been left to die. “It seemed
to me I had stepped into the gloomy circle of some Inferno,” he says.

“They were dying slowly—it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were
nothing earthly now, nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation lying confusedly in the greenish
gloom. Brought from all the recesses of the coast in the legality of time contracts, lost in uncongenial
surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl
away and rest. These moribund shapes were free as air—and nearly as thin. I began to distinguish the
gleam of the eyes under the trees. Then glancing down, I saw a face near my hand. The black bones reclined
at full length with one shoulder against the tree, and slowly the eyelids rose and the sunken eyes looked up
at me, enormous and vacant, a kind of blind, white flicker in the depths of the orbs which died out slowly.
The man seemed young—almost a boy—but you know with them it’s hard to tell. I found nothing else to do
but to offer him one of my good Swede’s ship’s biscuits I had in my pocket. The fingers closed slowly on it
and held—there was no other movement and no other glance. He had tied a bit of white worsted round his
neck—Why? Where did he get it? Was it a badge—an ornament—a charm—a propitiatory act? Was there
any idea at all connected with it? It looked startling round his black neck this bit of white thread from
beyond the seas.
Despite the last sentence, which links the grove of death to ancient and medieval catastrophes, there is a
sense here, as many readers have said, of something unprecedented in horror, something new on earth—
what later became known as genocide. It is one of Conrad’s bitter ironies that at least some of the Europeans
forcing the Congolese into labour are “liberals” devoted to the “suppression of savage customs.” What they
had perpetrated in the Congo was not, perhaps, planned slaughter, but it was a slaughter nonetheless, and
some of the students, pointing to the passage, were abashed. Western man had done this. We had created an
Inferno on earth. “Heart of Darkness,” written at the end of the nineteenth century, resonates unhappily
throughout the twentieth. Marlow’s shock, his amazement before the sheer strangeness of the ravaged
human forms, anticipates what the Allied liberators of the concentration camps felt in 1945. The answer to
the question “Does the book redeem the West?” was clear enough: No book can provide expiation for any
culture. But if some crimes are irredeemable, a frank acknowledgment of the crime might lead to a partial
remission of sin. Conrad had written such an acknowledgment.
Bring in Salman Rushdie on how Britishers have never remotely compensated
Kurtz was a criminal, an isolated figure. He was not representative of the West or of anything else. “Why is
this a critique of the West?” he demanded. “No culture celebrates men like Kurtz. No culture condones what
he did.” There was general protest, even a few laughs. “O.K.,” he said, yielding a bit. “It can be read as a
critique of the West, but not only of the West.”
Is “Heart of Darkness” a depraved book? The following is one of the passages Chinua Achebe deplores as
racist:

“We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We
could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at
the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil. But suddenly as we struggled round a bend there would
be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roots, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of and
clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling under the drop of heavy and motionless
foliage. The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. The
prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us—who could tell? We were cut off from the
comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as
sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand because we
were too far and could not remember because we were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that
are gone, leaving hardly a sign—and no memories.

“The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster,
but there—there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly and the men were . . . No,
they were not inhuman. Well, you know that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman.
It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped and spun and made horrid faces, but what thrilled you
was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and
passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough, but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself
that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim
suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you—you so remote from the night of first ages—could
comprehend.”
Achebe regards the book not as an expression of its time or as the elaboration of a fictional situation, in
which a white man’s fears of the unknown are accurately represented, but as a general slander against
Africans, a simple racial attack. As far as Achebe is concerned, Africans have struggled to free themselves
from the prison of colonial discourse, and for him reading Conrad meant re-entering the prison: “Heart of
Darkness” is a book in which Europeans consistently have the upper hand.
I wanted to argue as well that everything in “Heart of Darkness”—not just the spectacular frights of the
African jungle but everything, including the city of Brussels and Marlow’s perception of every white
character—is rendered sardonically and nightmarishly as an experience of estrangement and displacement.
Conrad certainly describes the Africans gesticulating on the riverbank as a violently incomprehensible
“other.” But consider the fictional situation! Having arrived fresh from Europe, Marlow, surrounded by
jungle, commands a small steamer travelling up the big river en route to an unknown destiny—death,
perhaps. He is a character in an adventure story, baffled by strangeness. Achebe might well have preferred
that Marlow engage the Africans in conversation or, at least, observe them closely and come to the
realization that they, too, are a people, that they, too, are souls, have a destiny, spiritual struggles, triumphs
and disasters of selfhood. But could African selfhood be described within this brief narrative, with its
extraordinary physical and philosophical momentum, and within Conrad’s purpose of exposing the “pitiless
folly” of the Europeans? Achebe wants another story, another hero, another consciousness. As it happens,
Marlow, regarding the African tribesmen as savage and incomprehensible, nevertheless feels a kinship with
them. He recognizes no moral difference between himself and them. It is the Europeans who have been
demoralized.

But what’s the use? Though Achebe is a novelist, not a scholar, variants of his critique have appeared in
many academic settings and in response to many classic works. Such publications as Lingua Franca are
often filled with ads from university presses for books about literature and race, literature and gender,
literature and empire. Whatever these scholars are doing in the classroom, they are seeking to make their
reputations outside the classroom with politicized views of literature. F. R. Leavis’s criterion of greatness in
literature—moral seriousness—has been replaced by the moral aggressiveness of the academic critic in
nailing the author to whatever power formation existed around him. “Heart of Darkness” could indeed be
read as racist by anyone sufficiently angry to ignore its fictional strategies, its palpable anguish, and the
many differences between Conrad’s eighteen nineties consciousness of race and our own. At the same time,
parts of the academic left now consider the old way of reading fiction for pleasure, for enchantment—my
falling hopelessly under Conrad’s spell—to be naïve, an unconscious submission to political values whose
nature is disguised precisely by the pleasures of the narrative. In some quarters, pleasure in reading has
itself become a political error, rather like sex in Orwell’s “1984.”
When Said arrives at “Heart of Darkness” (a book he loves), he asserts that Conrad, as much as Marlow
and Kurtz, was enclosed within the mind-set of imperial domination and therefore could not imagine any
possibilities outside it; that is, Conrad could imagine Africans only as ruled by Europeans. It’s perfectly
true that “Heart of Darkness” contains a few widely spaced and ambiguous remarks that appear to praise
the British variety of overseas domination. But how much do such remarks matter against the overwhelming
weight of all the rest—the awful sense of desolation produced by the physical chaos, the death and ravaging
cruelty everywhere? What readers remember is the squalor of imperialism, and it’s surely misleading for
Said to speak of “Heart of Darkness” as a work that was “an organic part of the ‘scramble for Africa,’” a
work that has functioned ever since to reassure Westerners that they had the right to rule the Third World. If
we are to discuss the question of the book’s historical effect, shouldn’t we ask, on the contrary, whether
thousands of European and American readers may not have become nauseated by colonialism after reading
“Heart of Darkness”? Said is so eager to find the hidden power in “Heart of Darkness” that he
underestimates the power of what’s on the surface.
It’s not enough that Conrad captured the soul of imperialism, the genocidal elimination of a people forced
into labour: no, his “tragic limitation” was his failure to “grant the natives their freedom.” Perhaps Said
means something fragmentary—a tiny gesture, an implication, a few words that would suggest the liberated
future. But I still find the idea bizarre as a suggested improvement of “Heart of Darkness,” and my mind is
flooded with visions from terrible Hollywood movies.
Achebe indulges a similar sentimentality. Conrad, he says, was so obsessed with the savagery of the
Africans that he somehow failed to notice that Africans just north of the Congo were creating great works of
art—making the masks and other art works that only a few years later would astound such painters as
Vlaminck, Derain, Picasso, and Matisse, thereby stimulating a new direction in European art. “The point of
all this,” Achebe writes, “is to suggest that Conrad’s picture of the people of the Congo seems grossly
inadequate.”

But Conrad certainly did not offer “Heart of Darkness” as “a picture of the peoples of the Congo,” any
more than Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart,” set in a Nigerian village, purports to be a rounded picture of the
British overlords. Conrad, as much as his master, Henry James, was devoted to a ruthless notion of form.
Short as it is—only about thirty-five thousand words— “Heart of Darkness” is a mordantly ironic tale of
rescue enfolding a philosophical meditation on the complicity between “civilization” and savagery. Conrad
practices a narrow economy and omits a great deal. Economy is also a remarkable feature of the art of
Chinua Achebe; and no more than Conrad should he be required to render a judgment for all time on every
aspect of African civilization.

Achebe wants “Heart of Darkness” ejected from the canon. “The question is whether a novel which
celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great
work of art,” he writes. “My answer is: No, it cannot.” Said, to be sure, would never suggest dropping
Conrad from the reading lists. Still, one has to wonder if blaming writers for what they fail to write about is
not an extraordinarily wrongheaded way of reading them. Among the academic left, literature now inspires
restless impatience. Literature excludes: it’s about one thing and not another, represents one point of view
and not another, “empowers” one class or race but not another. Literature lacks the perfection of justice, in
which all voices must be heard, weighed, balanced. European literature, in particular, is guilty of
association with the “winners” of history. Jane Austen is culpable because she failed to dramatize the true
nature of colonialism; Joseph Conrad is guilty because he did dramatize it. They are guilty by definition and
by category.

In the end, Achebe’s and Said’s complaints come down to this: Joseph Conrad lacked the consciousness of
race and imperial power which we have today. Poor, stupid Conrad! Trapped in his own time, he could do
no more than write his books. A self-approving moral logic has become familiar on the academic left: So-
and-so’s view of women, people of color, and the powerless lacks our amplitude, our humanity, our
insistence on the inclusion in discourse of all people. One might think that elementary candour would
require the academy to render gratitude to the older writers for yielding such easily detected follies.
But what Achebe and Said (and a fair number of other politicized critics) are offering is not simply a
different interpretation of this or that work but something close to an attack on the moral legitimacy of
literature
Reading Conrad again, one is struck by his extraordinary unease—and by what he made of it. In the end,
his precarious situation both inside and outside imperialism should be seen not as a weakness but as a
strength. Yes, Conrad the master seaman had done his time as a colonial employee, working for a Belgian
company in 1890, making his own trip up the Congo. He had lived within the consciousness of colonial
expansion. But if he had not, could he have written a book like “Heart of Darkness”? Could he have
captured with such devastating force the peculiar, hollow triviality of the colonists’ ambitions, the self-
seeking, the greed, the pettiness, the lies and evasions? Here was the last great Victorian, insisting on
responsibility and order, and fighting, at the same time, an exhausting and often excruciating struggle
against uncertainty and doubt of every kind, such that he cast every truth in his fictions as a mocking
illusion and turned his morally didactic tale into an endlessly provocative and dismaying battle between
stoical assumption of duty and perverse complicity in evil. Conrad’s sea-captain hero Marlow loathes the
monstrous Kurtz, yet feels, after Kurtz’s death, an overpowering loyalty to the integrity of what Kurtz
discovered in his furious descent into crime.

“The horror” was Conrad’s burden as man and artist—the violent contraries that possessed him. But what
a yield in art! Certainly T. S. Eliot and others understood “Heart of Darkness” to be one of the essential
works of modernism, a new kind of art in which the radically disjunctive experiences of the age would find
expression in ever more complex aesthetic forms. Seen in that light, the spectacular intricacy of Conrad’s
work is unimaginable without his participation in the destructive energies of imperialism. It’s possible that
Achebe and Said understand this better than any Western reader ever could. But great work galls us, drives
us into folly; the fervour of our response to it is a form of tribute. Despite his “errors,” Conrad will never
be dropped from the reading lists. Achebe’s and Said’s anguish only confirms his centrality to the modern
age.

Achebe believes that “Heart of Darkness” is an example of the Western habit of setting up Africa “as a foil
to Europe, a place of negations . . . in comparison with which Europe’s own state of spiritual grace will be
manifest.” Conrad, obsessed with the black skin of Africans, had as his real purpose the desire to comfort
Europeans in their sense of superiority: “‘Heart of Darkness’ projects the image of Africa as ‘the other
world,’ the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man’s vaunted intelligence and
refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality.” Achebe dismisses the grove-of-death passage and
others like it as “bleeding-heart sentiments,” mere decoration in a book that “parades in the most vulgar
fashion prejudices and insults from which a section of mankind has suffered untold agonies and atrocities in
the past and continues to do so in many ways and many places today,” and he adds, “I am talking about a
story in which the very humanity of black people is called in question.”
Form and Temporal Displacement
One of the obvious things about HD, one which has, I assume, received ample commentary is
Conrad’s narrative technique. Marlow’s tale is set in a frame story. The frame story is simple. A
handful of men are on a boat in the Thames, Marlow among them. He tells the story to them.
The frame tale takes up several pages at the beginning and makes several appearances
throughout the tale. Including, of course, one at the end, a rather short paragraph.
This device affords Conrad the use of second person discourse here and there as Marlow
addresses his companions and, thus, us readers as well, drawing us onto that boat on the Thames.
One of these incursions happens nearer the end than the beginning in the second of the story’s
three installments:
Why do you sigh in this beastly way, somebody? Absurd? Well, absurd. Good Lord!
mustn't a man ever—Here, give me some tobacco." . . .
There was a pause of profound stillness, then a match flared, and Marlow's lean face
appeared, worn, hollow, with downward folds and dropped eyelids, with an aspect of
concentrated attention; and as he took vigorous draws at his pipe, it seemed to retreat and
advance out of the night in the regular flicker of the tiny flame. The match went out.
"Absurd!" he cried. "This is the worst of trying to tell. . . . Here you all are, each
moored with two good addresses, like a hulk with two anchors, a butcher round one
corner, a policeman round another, excellent appetites, and temperature normal—you
hear—normal from year's end to year's end. And you say, Absurd!
This occurs as Marlow has been narrating the only fight sequence in the story. They were perhaps
a day’s journey from Kurtz’s compound and were attacked. Marlow lost his helmsman to a spear
through the chest (like the Chief in AN) and Marlow’s feet and shoes were drenched in the man’s
blood. So, Kurtz’s compound is near, but they’re not quite there.
Anyhow, Marlow continues on, presuming Kurtz to have been killed, and telling how
I was cut to the quick at the idea of having lost the inestimable privilege of listening to
the gifted Kurtz. Of course I was wrong. The privilege was waiting for me. Oh yes, I
heard more than enough. And I was right, too. A voice. He was very little more than a
voice.
And then . . . well, if I say everything about this passage that I find worthy of note, I’ll never get
through this post. So, I’ll cut to the chase. Marlow rambles on about Kurtz and in the middle of
the ramble we hear this:
Ivory? I should think so. Heaps of it, stacks of it. The old mud shanty was bursting with
it. You would think there was not a single tusk left either above or below the ground in
the whole country. ‘Mostly fossil,’ the manager had remarked disparagingly. It was no
more fossil than I am; but they call it fossil when it is dug up. It appears these niggers do
bury the tusks sometimes—but evidently they couldn't bury this parcel deep enough to
save the gifted Mr. Kurtz from his fate. We filled the steamboat with it, and had to pile a
lot on the deck. Thus he could see and enjoy as long as he could see, because the
appreciation of this favor had remained with him to the last. You should have heard him
say, ‘My ivory.’ Oh yes, I heard him. ‘My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river,
my—‘ everything belonged to him.
Note that last: ‘My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my—‘ everything belonged to him.
That’s not what I had in mind when I flagged this passage, but it’s worth thinking about.
But not now.
What interests me now is the temporal displacement. Marlow talks of filling the steamboat
with ivory. But, at this point in the tale, they’d not yet gotten to Kurtz’s station and were not even
sure of getting there. He’s jumping the temporal gun and telling us about something that would
happen later on in the story, but certainly not now, not while they’re still repelling an attack from
unseen attackers.
So, anyhow, Marlow goes on and on and on
He had taken a high seat amongst the devils of the land – I mean literally. You can't
understand. How could you? – with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind
neighbors ready to cheer you or to fall on you
The earth for us is a place to live in, where we must put up with sights, with sounds,
with smells too, by Jove!—breathe dead hippo, so to speak, and not be contaminated.
The original Kurtz had been educated partly in England, and—as he was good enough
to say himself—his sympathies were in the right place. His mother was half-English, his
father was half-French. All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz.
and on and on into a report Kurtz had prepared for the International Society for the Suppression
of Savage Customs:
It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it
blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky:
'Exterminate all the brutes!' The curious part was that he had apparently forgotten all
about that valuable postscriptum, because, later on, when he in a sense came to himself,
he repeatedly entreated me to take good care of 'my pamphlet' (he called it), as it was sure
to have in the future a good influence upon his career.
And, after a bit more, starts making his way back to the present point in the tale:
No; I can't forget him, though I am not prepared to affirm the fellow was exactly worth
the life we lost in getting to him. I missed my late helmsman awfully,—I missed him
even while his body was still lying in the pilot-house.
Finally, he lands back in the present, that is, the present moment in the tale itself, where he pulls
the spear from his helmsman’s body and tosses his body overboard. We’re now back in the flow
of the story, heading for Kurtz’s station, but presuming that Kurtz himself is dead and not having
any idea of what they’d find there.
That whole passage is worth detailed explication, not to discover any depths, but simply to
inventory the materials on the surface and to link them to other parts of the tale. Perhaps some
other time.
And one must note that this, I don’t know what you call it, ‘peroration’ is the word that comes
to mind, but it’s certainly not that. Whatever it is, it was prompted by the one death in the story
other than that of Kurtz himself. But that’s not why has my attention, not now.
What interests me is simply the temporal displacement. Other than allusions hither and yon it’s
the only such displacement in the story. Everything else is told in order, one thing after another.
Why? And how does it work? Do we have a means of answering such questions
Style
Point of View
Heart of Darkness is framed as a story within a story. The point of view belongs
primarily to Charlie Marlow, who delivers the bulk of the narrative, but Marlow's point of
view is in turn framed by that of an unnamed narrator who provides a first-person
description of Marlow telling his story. The point of view can also be seen in a third
consciousness in the book, that of Conrad himself, who tells the entire tale to the
reader, deciding as author which details to put in and which to leave out Beyond these
three dominant points of view are the individual viewpoints of the book's major
characters. Each has a different perspective on Kurtz. These perspectives are often
conflicting and are always open to a variety of interpretations. Whose point of view is to
be trusted? Which narrator and which character is reliable? Conrad leaves these
questions to the reader to answer, accounting for the book's complexity and multilayered
meanings.
Setting
The novel takes place in the 1890s and begins on a boat sitting in the River Thames,
which leads from London to the sea, waiting for the tide to turn. Marlow's story takes the
reader briefly onto the European continent (Belgium) and then deep into Africa by
means of a trip up the Congo River to what was then called the Belgian Congo, and
back to Europe again The Congo is described as a place of intense mystery whose
stifling heat, whispering sounds, and strange shifts of light and darkness place the
foreigner in a kind of trance which produces fundamental changes in the brain, causing
acts that range from the merely bizarre to the most extreme and irrational violence.
Structure
The book's structure is cyclical, both in geography and chronology. It begins in the
1890s, goes back several years, and returns to the present. The voyage describes
almost a perfect cir cle, beginning in Europe, traveling into the heart of the African
continent, coming out again, and returning almost to the exact spot at which it began.
The novel was originally published in serial form, breaking off Its segments at moments
of high drama to make the reader eager to pick up the next installment. When the full
text was published in 1902, it was divided into three parts. Part I takes the story from the
present-day life of the unidentified narrator to Marlow's tale, which began many years
before and unfolds over a period of several months. This section leads from London into
Belgium and from there to the Congo's Central Station. It ends with Marlow expressing
a limited curiosity about where Kurtz's supposed moral ideas well lead him. Part II takes
the journey through a series of difficulties as it proceeds deeper into the African interior
and finally arrives, some two months later, at the Inner Station. It is here that Marlow meets the Russian and
is told that Kurtz has "enlarged" his mind. Part ill covers the
period from Marlow's eventual meeting with Kurtz to his return to Europe