Heart of Darkness

About the book

Marlow tells fellow sailors about his employment with a trading company in central Africa and the journey that brought him towards the celebrated agent Kurtz. What he encounters repeatedly contradicts the confident language used to justify European activity. Conrad frames the account within another narrator's listening, making its hesitations and attempts at explanation part of the work. Material greed, bureaucratic absurdity, and violence appear beside the disturbing attraction of a powerful reputation. The narrative also restricts African people through Marlow's perspective, a limitation that demands attention rather than passive acceptance. Its unsettling force comes from the difficulty of telling what has been witnessed without reproducing the habits of thought that allowed the witness to enter that world in the first place.

• Empire
• Moral blindness
• Narrative limits

Why read it

For a densely framed account that makes both imperial claims and the narrator's explanations difficult to trust.

English text