Heart of Darkness
On a boat on the Thames at dusk, Marlow tells of his journey up the Congo River to find Kurtz, a brilliant ivory trader who has vanished into the jungle and set himself up as a god. Joseph Conrad's dark masterpiece. By Joseph Conrad (1899). A public-domain classic.
Content warnings: Violence · Death
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How it begins The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide.The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth. Keep reading →About this story
On a boat anchored in the Thames at dusk, a sailor named Marlow tells his friends about a journey he once made up a river in Africa to find a trader named Kurtz, who had stopped sending ivory and been silent for a long time. The further upriver he goes, the more the stories he hears about Kurtz change.
Joseph Conrad, a Polish-born writer who spent years as a ship’s officer, published it in 1899 as a magazine serial, and drew on a trip he made himself to the Congo in 1890. It is short but dense, and its ideas about empire, greed and what ‘civilisation’ means made it a landmark. Readers should know that it also contains racist language and attitudes of its time, and the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe famously criticised it for how it presents Africans. Many people read it with that argument in mind.
- Themes
- Empire, greed, the limits of civilisation, how stories are told
- Good for
- Readers who want a demanding, much-discussed classic; students of literature and history
- Worth noticing
- The frame: Marlow is telling this aloud to listeners, and he keeps breaking off.