Introduction:

Heart of Darkness is one of Conrad´s best well-known novels which has become even more famous because of adaptation in the serio-popular movie Apocalypse Now (1979) and a TV film called "Heart of Darkness".

In Conrad's Heart of Darkness Marlow comes to the Congo for experience and self in the ancient belief that a man is shaped by what he does, that character is formed by what happens to one. But surrounding all of man's efforts in the Congo is a presence: Kurtz listened to it and went mad, and Marlow recognizes it but refuses to listen, neutralizes the appeal of the unknown and survives Kurtz, who succumbed to the fascinating wilderness.

Heart of Darkness can be seen as a journey--Marlow's mythical journey in search of the self, in order to bring back a new truth, and, through all the pages of the novel, the main character relates his experiences journeying up the Congo River in quest of another white man, Kurtz. This enigmatic man was received by the black natives as if he were a god, but perhaps because he has gone into the jungle without knowing himself, and unprepared for the ordeal, his wrong conduct took him beyond the limits of his heart, paying the price in madness and death. On the contrary, Marlow did not transgress his limits and came back without fully understanding his experience, and although the heart of darkness tried to exercise it's influence on him, too, he was able to restrain himself--he recognized it's fascination and it's abomination, but resisted his desire to join in those unspeakable rites. Marlow was saved because his aim was self- knowledge, the mystery of existence, which demands a great humility.

Marlow as principal narrator, the teller of the story-within-a-story, has a perspective at once intriguing and questionable. He's like the "Ancient Mariner" of Coleridge's poem; he grips you with his storytelling skills. However, unlike the Mariner, he doesn't have a specific lesson to teach; his moral position is more ambiguous and uncertain. Marlow is a white middle-class European male of the 19th century, with all that cultural baggage (for all his sympathy towards the mistreated Africans, Marlow remains an imperialist -- his quarrel is less with colonialism than with the undeniably atrocious Belgian variety, and he himself often describes Africans with condescension or contempt).

He is also a knight on a grail-less quest (or one with a false grail), a cynic and a critic, and a keen observer of the depravities and corruption of his fellow men yet literally speechless before Africa and Africans.

Throughout his journey, he is confronted by signs which are more and more unrecognizable, because he and the others cannot impose meanings on them, or because the meanings they impose reflect their own anxieties more than anything else.

Marlow's worst moments in Heart of Darkness are when he is compelled to understand that the great adventure of his life, to which he is devoting such great efforts is really a business of death. Congo is splendid--like it's people it has a wild vitality, an intense energy of movement; but it is marked by death--streams of death in life in the extremity of an impotent despair; the jungle drives white men mad because of it's solitude; there is nobody, not a hut; there is only "death--the death of many men, the death of ethical behaviour, the death of goodness and civility, the death, crucially, of our authority as selves.

Darkness is the presence that does not permit to perceive the reality of that mysterious life. This presence that surrounds all of man's efforts in the jungle is listened to by Kurtz and he goes mad; Marlow recognizes it but refuses to listen. At this critical point, when his sense cannot perceive reality, he turns to Kurtz, the only one who can help him.

Through Conrad's irony, the reader is informed that, at last, Marlow has created an image of Kurtz that may be the prototype of the man he himself would have liked to be. He thinks that Kurtz can tell him things about himself which he does not know. And so intensely does he feel the possible connection between himself and the man, that he follows him even though he has no clear sense of his behaviour.

In fact, Marlow knows that Kurtz's experience has become a whole horror, but he cannot avoid loving his genuineness, his authenticity:

However, when Marlow at last compares himself to Kurtz, who has felt such a horror, he feels nothing for his life, nothing strong or worthwhile. This is the difference between himself and Kurtz: he feels he has lived incompletely, while Kurtz--gross and brutal--has broadened the range of human life. Although he may have done barbarous things, he has reached new experiences of the self, and against the indifference of the universe and all the insipidity of men, he has felt all the excitement that life can yield.

Now, when Marlow thinks of Kurtz's native woman, she appears to him as a wild apparition:

Marlow remembers her savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent. If he compares this splendid savage with Kurtz's European fiancee, "we are setting side by side dynamic energy with sterile hypocrisy, life with death."

Anyway, once back in Brussels, Marlow understands that he will be loyal to her sorrow rather than to Kurtz's death. His dialogue with Kurtz' girlsfriend illustrates the price Marlow is going to pay for the girl's sanity:

In this atmosphere and listening to the girlsfriend´s words, Marlow asks himself which Kurtz was more actual: the one in his memory or the one living on in this woman's sorrow?

Marlow can see what Kurtz has done but he begins to understand how it came about, and is thrust into complicity, eventually agreeing to lie for Kurtz, to cover up his crimes. He has to lie because he cannot agree to shatter the moral world of the Girlsfriend. Her world is based on love for Kurtz.

Marlow feels the world more and more unsteady about him, and when the Girlsfriend demands Kurtz's last words

The framing narrative of Heart of Darkness is presented by an unnamed, undefined speaker, who is one of a group of men, former sailors, now professionals, probably middle-aged, on the deck of a yacht at the mouth of the Thames River, London England. The time is probably contemporary with the writing and publication of the novel, so around the turn of the 20th century. One among the group, Charlie Marlow, a mysterious figure who is still a sailor, tells the story, (employing the first person plural), of something that happened to him several years before.

Most of the novel is Marlow's narration, although Conrad sometimes brings us back to the yacht and ends the novel there. This framing setting introduces some important motifs of Marlow's tale: sailing, exploration, imagery of light and darkness, the contrast of "civilization" and "primitivism" and of appearance and reality.

Remember that mostly this is a tale being told aloud. Ideally, you should be able to "hear" in your head while reading whatever you imagine Marlow's voice to sound like, especially if you identify yourself to any extent with the unidentified framing narrator. Is Marlow simply telling a story which is mystifying to his companions, or is he himself trying once again to figure out its meaning while he talks?

The description of people and landscape is much more figurative than literal: It doesn't push the plot along or explain things, but then neither does the dialogue, which tends to introduce and reinforce some of the principal thematic motifs suggested above.

He never gets to be a flesh-and-blood person: he's a word (introduced quite casually by the whiter-than-white Accountant in Part 1; then a voice, then a set of ideals: always an abstraction. Kurtz has gone into circumstances which call into question how much judgement depends on recognizable contexts (does "civilization" rob people of survival skills?). But Marlow doesn't know this: in the chaos of the journey, he retains hope that Kurtz will provide a clue to a universe with meaning, something more revelatory and profound than all these managers and pilgrims, these mean-spirited profit-driven Great White Hunters can provide. Is Kurtz important in himself, or in his effect on Marlow? Kurtz is more than simply an interesting character, he is an enigma. It is through Marlow and our own desire to discover the true identity of Kurtz, that the power of Heart of Darkness becomes apparent.

Like a knight of the Round Table, Marlow sets off in search of strange adventures. He only gradually acquires a grail, as he picks up more and more hints about Kurtz. Like a knight he is frequently tested by signs he must confront, question and interpret. Signs are things you see or experience or are told which have meaning beyond the literal: Old women knitting black wool might simply be relatives of the company personnel given some position of respect and usefulness, or the sombre colour of their wool and clothing, and their serious demeanour, might suggest that they mind the gateway to a mysterious underworld.

You might take as signs the following:
The first station, with its barrels of unused rivets, its needless blasting of a cliff as a railroad is built, its valley of death and shackled prisoners, and its gleaming white-suited Accountant, who frets over his figures while a man lies groaning his last in his office, the central station, rivetless and strawless, where the manager smiles his mysterious mean smile and the idle brickmaker drinks champagne and lights his privileged candle in its silver holder, where a man is dragged out at random and beaten for having set the fire (regardless of whether he did), and where Marlow's boat is sunk.

The Russian's cabin, then the Russian himself, a Shakespearean Fool with his motley clothes, his icon which is a dull text , and his ambivalent relationship with Kurtz the "gateposts" which become heads on poles, shrunken and dried and made to face Kurtz's house: signs not of domestic order but of terror. Even before he sets out, omens present themselves to Marlow: the old women knitting black wool in the Belgian office, the phrenologist measuring Marlow's skull and warning of changes to take place inside, the tale of how his predecessor died in an uncharacteristic dispute over hens.

Url: http://www.chesco.com/~artman/conrad.html

Url: http://www.stfrancis.edu/en/student/kurtzweb/explain.htm

Joseph Conrad. Youth, Heart of Darkness. Oxford University Press. Introduction, Notes, Glossary © Robert Kimbrough 1984. Select Bibliography, Chronology © J. Batchelor 1983