Heart of Darkness Summary: Conrad's Voyage Up the River
What Heart of Darkness is about
Heart of Darkness is a novella by the Polish-British writer Joseph Conrad, first published in 1899 as a three-part serial in Blackwood's Magazine, issued to mark the magazine's 1000th edition. It is short, dense and told at one remove. A sailor named Charles Marlow sits with friends on a boat on the sea-reach of the Thames and tells them how he came to captain a river steamer for a Belgian ivory trading company in the African interior.
Conrad never names the river. He did not need to. At the time of writing, the Congo Free State, through which the economically vital Congo River runs, was the private colony of King Leopold II of Belgium. The book is widely read as a critique of European colonialism in Africa, and alongside that it examines power, morality and the thin line between the people who call themselves civilised and the people they call savages.
The engine of the plot is a man Marlow never meets until very late. Kurtz is an ivory trader running a station far up the river. Everyone talks about him. The company's chief accountant describes him as a first-class agent who will go far. Others resent him. The rumours grow stranger the further upriver Marlow travels, and the journey to find him becomes the whole point of the book.
The journey, in outline
Marlow begins by recalling his childhood fascination with the blank spaces on maps, Africa above all, and with one river in particular. He takes passage on a steamer and makes his way thirty miles up the river to his company's Outer Station, where a railway is being built. Exploring a narrow ravine, he finds himself among critically ill Africans who worked on the railroad and have been left to die. It is one of the most quietly devastating passages in the book.
He waits ten days, then sets off with sixty men for the Central Station, where his steamboat is based. The boat has been wrecked. Marlow fishes it out of the river and spends months repairing it, short of tools and parts and increasingly frustrated. When he finally gets underway, the trip to Kurtz's Inner Station takes two months. Thick fog. An attack by arrows from the bank. The helmsman is killed. Marlow drives the attackers off by sounding the steam whistle.
At Kurtz's station a Russian wanderer comes aboard, a man who strayed into the camp and now speaks of Kurtz with open reverence, admiring his power and his willingness to use it. He says the local people worship Kurtz, and that Kurtz has been very ill. Marlow suspects something simpler and worse: that Kurtz has gone mad. Then he looks more closely at the posts around the station house and sees what is mounted on them.
The main characters
Marlow is the narrator and the moral centre, though he is not a hero. He is curious, stubborn, capable at his job, and he keeps looking at things he would rather not see. His account is shaped by the fact that he survived and came home.
Kurtz is the absent presence. A gifted agent, an eloquent man, the author of a commissioned report, and someone who has set himself up as a god among the people he was sent to trade with. The company manager complains only that his methods are unsound, which tells you a great deal about the company.
Around them: the general manager, who resents Kurtz and is in no hurry to rescue him; the chief accountant, immaculate in the middle of ruin; the Russian wanderer, a disciple; and Kurtz's fiancee in Europe, still in mourning more than a year after his death.
The themes
Conrad's central idea is that there is little real difference between so-called civilised people and so-called savages. He makes the point structurally. Marlow opens by reminding his listeners that when the Romans arrived in Britain nineteen hundred years ago they would have felt the utter savagery pressing in on them. London, the greatest town on earth, sits under the same shadow as the river station.
Beneath that sit corruption, madness and power. The company's language is commercial and respectable. Its practice is extraction and death. Kurtz is what happens when a man with great ability is placed somewhere with no restraint and no witnesses, and the book refuses to treat him as a freak case.
How it ends
Stop here if you want the ending left alone. Kurtz is carried aboard the steamer and the boat starts back down the river. His health collapses. He hands Marlow a packet of papers, including his report and a photograph, and tells him to keep them from the manager. Near death, he whispers, "The horror! The horror!" He is buried in a muddy hole.
Back in Europe, Marlow is bitter and contemptuous of the civilised world. He fends off the callers who want Kurtz's papers and gives the report to a journalist. Then he visits Kurtz's fiancee, who presses him to repeat the dying man's last words. Marlow tells her that Kurtz's final word was her name.
Why it still matters
The book has never settled into comfortable classic status. It is read both as an indictment of imperialism and as a text to argue about, because of how it represents Africa and Africans. That argument has kept it on reading lists for more than a century. In 1998 the Modern Library placed it 67th on its list of the 100 best novels in English of the 20th century. It has been republished and translated repeatedly, and it gave Francis Ford Coppola the shape of Apocalypse Now in 1979, with the river moved to Vietnam. For a story of roughly a hundred pages, it has cast a long shadow.
