Heart of darkness study guide pdf

The manager is an interesting character. He seems to hate Kurtz. If Marlow and Kurtz are linked together, then he must hate Marlow. This explains why Marlow is uneasy around him. And if the manager praises Kurtz, but Marlow dislikes the manager, can he accept his assessment of Kurtz? How can he be a brickmaker if there are no bricks around? He fits the man who repairs roads earlier in the section, when Marlow said he did not see roads or upkeep.

A mysterious element surrounds many characters. It is difficult to get a sense of them. Are they the way Marlow describes them, or is he purposely omitting important information about them? If he is, then why? Conrad raises these questions through the use of the first-person flashback narrative. The picture of a woman draped and blindfolded carrying a lighted torch against a black background suggests a few ideas.

First, we see the combination of light and dark again. In the next sequence, Marlow reveals much about his philosophy.

He says he hates and detests a lie. Later, we have to compare that moment with this statement. Marlow then says it is difficult for him to convey Kurtz to his listeners, the people on the boat. This implies us, the reader, also. Do you see the story? Do you see anything? He is trying to tell the untellable, explain the unexplainable.

It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for one person to understand another. If this is true, then Marlow cannot understand Kurtz, Kurtz cannot understand Marlow, and we cannot understand either of them.

We can try to make sense, nothing more. This breaks the dream-like trance of the story. We come back to reality, if only for a moment. Everyone but the narrator is asleep. Without them, his journey ends. This leads to a humorous scene when Marlow meets the Boilermaker, one of the few men he admires in the jungle.

Marlow abhors them. They stand on the shore alongside the steamboat. Without moving, he listens. Marlow says he sees Kurtz in his mind for the first time, how he faces the wilderness and desolation. Marlow jumps up to look at the forest, half expecting to receive an answer from the darkness. The Eldorado Expedition leaves for the wilderness a few days later. It will not happen for two more months, though.

They encounter warm air, empty streams, and the deep forest as they travel upriver. Marlow compares it to going back to the beginning of the world. Hippos and alligators line the sand-banks. Stillness and silence brood over everything. He has to watch for hidden banks to avoid damaging the boat. He says when you attend to things on the surface, reality fades.

Once, he needs twenty cannibals to help push the boat. With the manager and three or four pilgrims holding their staves aboard, they pass white men greeting them with joy about ivory, the word itself ringing in the air.

Massive trees fill the immense landscape. He hears the roll of drums, but does not understand if they signify war, peace, or prayer. The snapping of a twig can shatter the stillness of dawn. He again compares his journey to prehistoric times.

Ancient man curses, prays, and welcomes them. Like phantoms, they glide past their surroundings. Man must meet the truth with his own strength, not an external force. Someone on the Nellie grunts a question. Marlow answers by saying he did not go ashore because he had to worry about the steampipes and the boat. Marlow mentions the fireman, a black man who keeps fire in the boiler. He could have been on shore with the natives, but instead helps Marlow because he has been trained for a profession.

His filed teeth, strange patterns shaved on his head, and three scars on each of his cheeks fit well with his belief that an evil spirit lived inside the boiler. Hurry up. Approach cautiously. They look into the jungle, but find no clues. In the hut, with a plank on two posts serving as a table and rubbish in a dark corner, he finds a coverless book, An Inquiry into some Points of Seamanship. While absorbed with the book, Marlow forgets the forest, the manager, and woodpile.

When he looks up, everything has gone. The pilgrims shout at him, as he puts the book in his pocket. The boat is loaded and ready to go. Marlow thinks of what he will say to Kurtz when he meets him. The manager suggests they wait until morning for safety. Annoyed, Marlow reasons that one more night means little after so many months.

The unnatural silence makes him believe he is deaf. At three in the morning, fish leap, their splash reminding Marlow of gun fire. Fog accompanies the rising sun. It lifts by eight or nine in the morning. He orders the anchor, which they were taking in, to be paid out again. It ends in a shriek, then stops, leaving silence. Frightened, the pilgrims rush for their guns—Winchesters. They anticipate an attack. Marlow notices the different expressions on the whites and blacks aboard the ship.

The whites look discomposed, shocked at the frightful noise. Though interested, the blacks remain calm. They grunt to each other.

One black man says they should catch the people hiding in the jungle. Besides some rations they had brought aboard, they had taken only rotten hippo-meat, which the pilgrims had thrown overboard. In theory, Marlow says, they were to use their payment—three nine-inch pieces of brass—to purchase food at the villages.

Sarcastically, Marlow says they could have eaten the wire itself for food. Marlow wonders why the cannibals do not eat the five white men. They could have easily overpowered them. Something had restrained them, but Marlow is not sure what.

The manager wants to push on. Marlow knows they cannot steer properly. The manager defers to his judgment. Marlow turns away from the manager to look into the fog. Marlow believes the thick fog will prevent it. Marlow feels the pilgrims stare at him as if he is mad. A bright green islet appears in the middle of the stream. Marlow can steer either left or right, with each path looking similar. He chooses the western passage because he had been informed the station was on the west side.

It is narrower than he had anticipated. He steers the boat close to the bank, where the water is deepest. Marlow mentions the helmsman, a black man who thinks highly of himself. He wears a pair of brass earrings and blue cloth wrapper.

This indicates how the water turns shallow. The next moment, the poleman falls flat to the deck without the pole, and the fireman sits ducking by his furnace. Arrows fly. Marlow instructs the helmsman to steer straight. The pilgrims fire their guns into the jungle. Letting go of the steering, the helmsman grabs a gun. Marlow yells at him to return to his duty. They hit overhanging bushes. The helmsman holds his rifle and yells at the shore.

Something big appears in the air, knocking the helmsman back. His head hits the wheel twice. He rolls back and stares up at Marlow, a shaft of spear sticking below his ribs.

The helmsman clutches the spear while Marlow forces himself to turn away from him and steer. He pulls the steam whistle cord repeatedly with one hand.

The warlike yells die, the arrows stop. Marlow and a pilgrim in pink pajamas stand over the helmsman. He dies without making a sound, a frown coming over his face at the last moment. Marlow tells the agent to steer. He tugs at his shoelaces. He believes Kurtz is dead now, too. Marlow throws one shoe overboard. He feels disappointment in not being able to speak with Kurtz now. He throws his other shoe overboard.

Marlow thinks he has missed his destiny in life if he cannot hear Kurtz talk. The match shows his narrow face and dropped eyelids. He draws on his pipe, then the match goes out. This momentary switch in scene ends. Marlow speaks of missing the privilege of listening to Kurtz. He amazes himself that he does not shed tears over missing Kurtz. Marlow now jumps ahead in his story. Marlow marvels at the amount of ivory Kurtz had collected.

It fills the mud shanty and the boat when they load it. There could not be a single tusk either above or below the ground. He says Kurtz watched over it and referred to everything as belonging to him. Kurtz was not common, Marlow says. His power to charm had influenced the natives, as well as himself. Marlow misses the helmsman and the partnership they had developed as they worked together.

The current takes his body, it rolls over twice, then disappears. Marlow says he had been a second-rate helmsman, but now he would be a first-class temptation—meaning food for the cannibals. Marlow steers after the funeral. Everyone on board believes Kurtz is dead. One red-haired pilgrim says they must have slaughtered everyone. Marlow says they at least had made a lot of smoke. He thinks they had missed their targets during the fight, by shooting too high.

The screeching whistle had sent them running, he maintains. The manager talks of getting down the river for safety before it turns dark. A decaying building with the jungle background fills the slope of a hill. They finally see the station. A white man wearing a hat like a cartwheel motions to them.

Other human forms glide through the jungle. Marlow stops the engine and lets the boat drift. The manager tells the man about the attack. The man knows about it and says everything is all right.

He reminds Marlow of a harlequin: bright clothes of blue, red, and yellow sparkling in the sun. He looks young with a boyish face, no beard, and little blue eyes. He asks Marlow if he is English, and Marlow answers with the same question. Pointing up the hill, he tells them Kurtz is there. Armed, the manager and pilgrims go to the house. The man comes aboard.

The sound of the whistle works better to drive the natives away than guns do, he says. Kurtz, he adds, they listen to him. The son of an arch-priest, he is Russian, had run away from school, and served on English ships.

He had been wandering alone on the river for two years. He is twenty-five, not so young as he looks. He tells Marlow the small house, stack of wood, and note were his. Marlow hands him the book. He makes as if to kiss Marlow, but restrains himself. Marlow finds out that the notes in the book are in Russian, not cipher. He tells Marlow that the natives had attacked because they do not want Kurtz to be taken away, not to kill him and the crew. He opens his arms and stares at Marlow.

Analysis Marlow hears second-hand information about Kurtz from the manager and his uncle. He gathers bits from them about Kurtz, the way we gather bits from him. He anticipates meeting Kurtz, mirroring our interest. At first, it was for the job and the adventure, but now Kurtz occupies his thoughts. We come to see how the manager and his uncle represent the selfishness and greediness of civilized Europe.

They care only about themselves, their positions, and promotions. The uncle gestures toward the forest as he suggests how the climate may destroy Kurtz. The power of nature overwhelms the power of man. Marlow then compares traveling farther into the jungle to prehistoric times. No civilization or laws governed people then. He adds to this idea of the ancient past without laws by speaking of the cannibals on the boat.

As the drums roll, Marlow sees the natives on shore. Their howling, leaping, and spinning thrill him. This enables him to meet the truth before him—these savages dancing in the jungle. Notice how the farther he moves away from Europe, the more he identifies with the natives. The fireman, who fires the boiler, represents a combination of both worlds, savage and civilized.

He wears a charm made of rags around his arm and a piece of polished bone through his lower lip. He personifies the transformation from the savage native to the educated white man. Marlow compares him to a dog walking on his hind-legs, which simultaneously insults and compliments him.

Their value transcends their tattered appearance. As the boat progresses up the river, Marlow and the manager disagree about their navigation. The manager urges caution, while Marlow wants to push on. Any delay annoys him. He disregards the dangers. They belong to the beginnings of time and eat rotten hippo-meat. He marvels at how they simply do not overpower the white men to eat them.

For all their supposed barbarity, the savages and cannibals control their behavior more than the white man, who initiates violence in the search for ivory and wealth.

They even check their hunger through some kind of restricting code of law. The arguments between Marlow and the manager build the tension and accentuate their differences. The closer Marlow gets to Kurtz, the more reckless he becomes. The manager always remains wary. Conrad intends this blurring on literal and symbolic levels. It becomes difficult to distinguish one from the other. The pilgrims, with their more sophisticated weapons, lose any advantage they might have.

Accustomed to the jungle, the natives seize the initiative with their primitive spears. The pilgrims fire at random into the forest. They cannot see their targets, but their targets can see them. The helmsman suffers a horrible death, a spear hitting him in the side below the ribs. After watching him die, Marlow thinks that Kurtz must be dead as well. This man means little to him in relation to Kurtz. Of course, Conrad throws in a catch. These comparisons determine important distinctions.

Marlow is like Kurtz because he leads, but he also resembles us because he listens. The first time, Marlow lights his pipe, which illuminates his face momentarily. The second time, Marlow becomes silent. The idea of light and dark couples with sound and silence. Marlow then jumps forward in his narrative. We cannot simply accept the story as told, but must consider how Conrad gives us information. The deception Conrad incorporates in his narrative mirrors the deception Marlow encounters in the jungle.

While he navigates the Congo, we navigate his story. In his jump ahead, Marlow offers us glimpses of Kurtz before he appears. She will not appear until the end of the novella. In a sense, Marlow wants to transform himself into one of the natives, a follower of this mad deity.

Appearances can be deceiving, as the jungle often proves. The appearance of the Russian next adds a sort of strange, humorous element to the story.

He fills in some missing details for Marlow. He tells him that the hut, firewood, and note had been his. Almost as a sign of thanks for these bits of information, Marlow gives him the book he had found in the hut. This last image alludes to a religious service, where a priest the Russian invites his parishioner Marlow to worship their god Kurtz.

He wonders how he had survived in the jungle. Marlow imagines he will disappear before his eyes. The Russian tells Marlow to take Kurtz away quickly. He says he had talked to Kurtz many nights, especially about love. The Russian throws his arms up in praise of Kurtz. Frightened, for the first time he sees the jungle as a dark place without hope. He had nursed Kurtz through two illnesses.

Often, he had waited many days for Kurtz to return from his wanderings. He tells Marlow how Kurtz had discovered villages, a lake, and searched for ivory. It had always been worth the wait. Marlow reminds the Russian how Kurtz had run out of goods to trade for ivory. He asks if Kurtz had the natives following him. Once, Kurtz had tried to kill him, he says. Kurtz had wanted his ivory. The Russian had given it to him. He had to be careful, until he had reestablished his friendship with Kurtz.

He had nursed him through his second illness then. Marlow says Kurtz is mad. The Russian objects. He tells Marlow he will change his mind when he hears Kurtz speak. Marlow sees people moving in the forest through his binoculars. One respected critic of the time, Hugh Clifford, said in the Spectator that others before Conrad had written of the European's decline in a "barbaric" wilderness, but never "has any writer till now succeeded in bringing Conrad in this wonderful, this magnificent, this terrible study.

For sheer excitement, Garnett compared Heart of Darkness favorably to Crime and Punishment, published by the great Russian novelist Dostoyevsky in Garnett calls Heart of Darkness "simply a piece of art, fascinating and remorseless. Widmer concluded that although "much of Conrad's fiction is patently poor," his sea stories contain a "documentary fascination in their reports of dying nineteenth-century merchant marine sailing experience. But he acknowledges that Conrad's best fiction, among which he counts Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, The Secret Sharer, and The Secret Agent, which he says may be "Conrad's most powerful novel," achieves a modernism that undercuts those heavy-handed Victorian characteristics and provides the basis on which Conrad's reputation justifiably rests.

In more recent years, Heart of Darkness has come under fire for the blatantly racist attitudes it portrays. Some critics have taken issue with the matter-of-fact tone in which Marlow describes Africans as "savages" and "niggers" and portrays African life as mysterious and inhuman.

My answer is: No, It cannot. Despite such controversy, Heart of Darkness has withstood the test of time and has come to be seen as one of Conrad's finest works. The way in which Conrad presents themes of moral ambiguity in this novel, never taking a side but forcing the reader to decide the issues for him—or herself is considered a forerunner of modem literary technique. Frederick Karl, in Joseph Conrad: The Three lives, calls Heart of Darkness the work in which "the nineteenth century becomes the twentieth.

Guerard in his introduction to the novel, "are among the finest of Conrad's short novels, and among the half-dozen greatest short novels in the English language. Attell argues that critics who argue that the novel is either historical or philosophical "misses Conrad's insight that the two are in fact inseparable. It was subsequently published in a collection of three stories by Conrad in The date of Heart of Darkness should be noted, for it provides a historical context which illuminates the story's relation to both the contemporary turn-of-the-century world to which Conrad responds in the tale, and also the influential role Conrad plays in the subsequent progress of twentieth-century literary history.

Traditionally there have been two main ways of approaching the interpretation of Heart of Darkness. Critics and readers have tended to focus on either the implications of Conrad's intense fascination with European colonialism in Africa and around the world, or they have centered on his exploration of seemingly more abstract philosophical issues regarding, among other things, the human condition, the nature of Good and Evil, and the power of language. The former interpretive choice would concentrate on the ways Conrad presents European colonialism of which he had much firsthand experience, being a sailor himself , while the latter would primarily investigate Conrad's exposition of philosophical questions.

Even a cursory reading of the tale makes it clear that there is ample evidence for both of these interpretive concerns. What is perhaps less obvious, but equally important, is the way the historical reality which Conrad takes as his subject matter and the philosophical meditation to which Kurtz's story gives rise are intrinsically connected to one another.

The turn of the twentieth century was a period of intense colonial activity for most of the countries of Europe. Conrad refers to European colonialism countless times in Heart of Darkness, but perhaps the most vivid instance is when Marlow, while waiting in the office of the Belgian Company, sees "a large shining map [of colonial Africa], marked with all the colours of the rainbow.

There was," he says, "a vast amount of real good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done there, a deuce of a lot of blue, a little green, smears of orange, and, on the East Coast, a purple patch. However, I wasn't going into any of these. I was going into the yellow. The map bears noting. On the one hand it establishes the massive geographical scale of Europe's colonial presence in Africa, but It also symbolically sets this presence up in relation to another central thematic concern of the novella: the popular conception of colonialism in Europe.

Just a few moments before describing the map in the office in Brussels Marlow had recalled his childhood, saying: "Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting but they all look that I would put my finger on it and say, When I grow up I will go there.

Another example of the distance between the popular conception of the colonies and their reality can be found in the frequent reference made to the purportedly civilizing aspect of colonial conquest. Marlow's aunt speaks of "weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways" and Kurtz's early pamphlet ominously claims that "by the simple exercise of [the colonists'] will [they] can exert a power for good practically unbounded.

And to Conrad's British readers of these revelations may have been shocking. There was, it should be noted, a growing anti- colonial campaign being waged by dissidents throughout Europe at the time, and Conrad's novella can be considered a part of that campaign. But in addition to the aggressive presentation of the grim conditions which existed in Europe's colonies—which Conrad succeeds in making very vivid —Heart of Darkness also creates a theme from certain philosophical problems which become central to the dawning literary movement called Modernism.

Conrad shows the way the European public is profoundly ignorant perhaps willfully of what goes on in their colonies, but he also suggests that that very separation reveals a problematic relation between belief and reality, between representation and truth, which can also be investigated as a philosophical question.

Keeping in mind the way this problem has been introduced in the novella ie. In most accounts of the period what links the Modernist writers loosely together is their intensive formal experimentation with literary and linguistic techniques; that is to say, their experimentation with the actual modes of literary representation.

Language in Modernist literature is no longer seen as a stable vehicle for the communication of meaning, but rather it is put up for radical questioning in itself Modernist experimentation, one might say, arises out of the doubt that language at least language as it has been used in the past is able to communicate or sufficient to represent meaning or truth.

And the seeds of this very doubt, to bring us back to Conrad, can be seen in Heart of Darkness. Some of the most illustrative examples of how Conrad introduces these Modernistic concerns can be seen at the points of Marlow's narration where the actual question of meaning explicitly arises.

Clearly Marlow has no trouble narrating events; he is indeed quite a storyteller. Yet, at various times in the narration the flow of his speech is interrupted and he seems at a loss for words. If we pick one of these moments we can see the way Conrad is creating a theme from the very instability and inadequacy of language itself "words," "names," the "story" to contain and convey what one might call "truth," "meaning," or "essence" Marlow calls it all three.

At a point well into his tale Marlow says: "At the time I did not see [Kurtz]—you understand He was Just a word for me. I did not see the man in the name any more than you do. Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream—making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream—sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is the very essence of dreams It is impossible.

We live, as we dream—alone. In the quoted passage Marlow is exasperated because when faced with the task of communicating something deeper than just the narrative of events he is at a loss for words—or more precisely, the words themselves fail him. His pronouncement that it is "Impossible" for language to do certain things—for language to hold the essence of things as they exist —foreshadows the dilemma at the center of Modernist and indeed much of twentieth- century philosophical thought.

But what he is trying to tell is not just "the Truth" in the abstract, but rather the truth about Kurtz, the truth of his experience of the European colonies. This suggests the way that the philosophical themes of the tale are intertwined with if not identical to the colonial themes.

Conrad has the two coexisting in such close proximity that they in fact appear to be two sides of the same coin.

As the complex textual fusion of the two in Heart of Darkness implies, the seemingly abstract philosophical problems concerning language and truth arise only out of concrete problems such as colonialism which exist in the social world, while at the same time the concrete problems of colonial domination at the turn of the twentieth century have extensive philosophical implications.

In the following excerpt, Achebe argues that the racist attitudes inherent in Conrad's novel make it "totally inconceivable" that it could be considered "great art " Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as "the other world," the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where a man's vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality.

The book opens on the River Thames, tranquil, resting peacefully "at the decline of day after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks. The River Congo is quite decidedly not a River Emeritus. It has rendered no service and enjoys no old-age pension. We are told that "going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginning of the world.

Yes, but that is not the real point. What actually worries Conrad is the lurking hint of kinship, of common ancestry. For the Thames, too, "has been one of the dark places of the earth. But if it were to visit its primordial relative, the Congo, It would run the terrible risk of hearing grotesque, suggestive echoes of its own forgotten darkness, and of falling victim to an avenging recrudescence of the mindless frenzy of the first beginnings.

I am not going to waste your time with examples of Conrad's famed evocation of the African atmosphere. In the final consideration it amounts to no more than a steady, ponderous, fake—ritualistic repetition of two sentences, one about silence and the other about frenzy An example of the former is "It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention" and of the latter, "The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy.

The eagle-eyed English critic, F. Leavis, drew attention nearly thirty years ago to Conrad's "adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensible mystery. For it raises serious questions of artistic good faith. When a writer, while pretending to record scenes, incidents and their impact, is in reality engaged in inducing hypnotic stupor in his readers through a bombardment of emotive words and other forms of trickery much more has to be at stake than stylistic felicity.

Generally, normal readers are well armed to detect and resist such underhand activity. He chose the role of purveyor of comforting myths.

The most interesting and revealing passages in Heart of Darkness are, however, about people. I must quote a long passage from the middle of the story in which representatives of Europe in a steamer going down the Congo encounter the denizens of Africa: 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 wonld be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of branches swaying, of eyes rolling, under the droop 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 gilded past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We 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 flee.

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 your remote kins hip 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 winch you—you so remote from the night of first ages—could comprehend.

Herein lies the meaning of Heart of Darkness and the fascination it holds over the Western mind: "What thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours— ugly. A few months of training had done for that really fine chap. He squinted at the steam gauge and at the water gauge with an evident effort of intrepidity—and he had filed his teeth, too, the poor devil, and the wool of his pate shaved into queer patterns, and three ornamental scars on each of his cheeks.

As everybody knows, Conrad is a romantic on the side. He might not exactly admire savages clapping their hands and stamping their feet but they have at least the merit of being in their place, unlike this dog in a parody of breeches. For Conrad, things and persons being in their place is of the utmost importance. Towards the end of the story, Conrad lavishes great attention quite unexpectedly on an African woman who has obviously been some kind of mistress to Mr. Kurtz and now presides if I may be permitted a little imitation of Conrad like a formidable mystery over the inexorable imminence of his departure: She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent.

She stood looking at us without a stir and like the wilderness itself, with all air of brooding over all inscrutable purpose. This Amazon is drawn in considerable detail, albeit of a predictable nature, for two reasons.

First, she is in her place and so can win Conrad's special brand of approval; and second, she fulfills a structural requirement of the story; she is a savage counterpart to the refined, European woman with whom the story will end: She came forward, all in black with a pale head, floating towards me in the dusk She was in mourning She took both my hands in hers and murmured, "I had heard you were coming" She had a mature capacity for fidelity, for belief, for suffering.

The difference in the attitude of the novelist to these two women is conveyed in too many direct and subtle ways to need elaboration. But perhaps the most significant difference is the one implied in the author's bestowal of human expression to the one and the withholding of it from the other. It is clearly not part of Conrad's purpose to confer language on the "rudimentary souls" of Africa.

They only "exchanged short grunting phrases" even among themselves but mostly they were too busy with their frenzy. There are two occasions in the book, however, when Conrad departs somewhat from his practice and confers speech, even English speech, on the savages.

The first occurs when cannibalism gets the better of them: "Catch 'im," he snapped, with a bloodshot widening of his eyes and a flash of sharp white teeth"catch 'im Give 'im to us " "To you, eh? The other occasion is the famous announcement: Mistah Kurtz—he dead. At first sight, these instances might be mistaken for unexpected acts of generosity from Conrad. Weighing the necessity for consistency in the portrayal of the dumb brutes against the sensational advantages of securing their conviction by clear, unambiguous evidence issuing out of their own mouth, Conrad chose the latter.

As for the announcement of Mr. Kurtz's death by the "insolent black head of the doorway," what better or more appropriate finis could be written to the horror story of that wayward child of civilization who willfully had given his soul to the powers of darkness and "taken a high seat amongst the devils of the land" than the proclamation of his physical death by the forces he had joined?

It might be contended, of course, that the attitude to the African in Heart of Darkness is not Conrad's but that of his fictional narrator, Marlow, and that far from endorsing it Conrad might indeed be holding it up to Irony and criticism. Certainly, Conrad appears to go to considerable pains to set up layers of insulation between himself and the moral universe of his story. He has, for example, a narrator behind a narrator. The primary narrator is Marlow but his account is given to us through the filter of a second, shadowy person.

But if Conrad's intention is to draw a cordon sanitaire between himself and the moral and psychological malaise of his narrator, his care seems to me totally wasted because he neglects to hint however subtly or tentatively at an alternative frame of reference by which we may judge the actions and opniions of his characters. It would not have been beyond Conrad's power to make that provision if he had thought it necessary.

Marlow seems to me to enjoy Conrad's complete confidence—a feeling reinforced by the close similarities between their careers. Marlow comes through to us not only as a witness of truth, but one holding those advanced and humane views appropriate to the English liberal tradition which required all Englishmen of decency to be deeply shocked by atrocities in Bulgaria or the Congo of King Leopold of the Belgians or wherever.

It took different forms in the minds of different people but almost always managed to sidestep the ultimate question of equality between white people and black people. That extraordinary missionary, Albert Schweitzer, who sacrificed brilliant careers in music and theology in Europe for a hfe of service to Africans in much the same area as Conrad writes about, epitomizes the ambivalence.

In a comment which I have often quoted but must quote one last time Schweitzer says: "The African is indeed my brother but my junior brother. Naturally, he became a sensation in Europe and America. Conrad's liberalism would not take him quite as far as Schweitzer's, though. He would not use the word "brother" however qualified; the farthest he would go was "kinship. And the intimate profundity of that look he gave me when he received Ins hurt remains to this day in my memory—like a claim of dIstant kinship affirmed 10 a supreme moment It is important to note that Conrad, careful as ever with his words, is not talking so much about distant kinship as about someone laying a claim on it.

The black man lays a claim on the white man which is well-nigh intolerable. It is the laying of this claim which frightens and at the same time fascinates Conrad, " That this simple truth is glossed over in criticism of his work is due to the fact that white racism against Africa is such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely undetected. Students of Heart of Darkness will often tell you that Conrad is concerned not so much with Africa as with the deterioration of one European mind caused by solitude and sickness.

They will point out to you that Conrad is, if anything, less charitable to the Europeans in the story than he is to the natives. A Conrad student told me in Scotland last year that Africa is merely a setting for the disintegration of the mind of Mr. Which is partly the point: Africa as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril.

Of course, there is a preposterous and perverse kind of arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the breakup of one petty European mind. But that is not even the point. The real question is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans which this age-long attitude has fostered and continues to foster in the world. And 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.

My answer is: No, it cannot. I would not call that man an artist, for example, who composes an eloquent instigation to one people to fall upon another and destroy them. No matter how striking his imagery or how beautiful his cadences fall such a man is no more a great artist than another may be called a priest who reads the mass backwards or a physician who poisons his patients. All those men in Nazi Germany who lent their talent to the service of virulent racism whether in science, philosophy or the arts have generally and rightly been condemned for their perversions.

The time is long overdue for taking a hard look at the work of creative artists who apply their talents, alas often considerable as in the case of Conrad, to set people against people. For poetry surely can only be on the side of man's deliverance and not his enslavement; for the brotherhood and unity of all mankind and against the doctrines of Hitler's master races or Conrad's "rudimentary souls.

It was certainly not his fault that he lived his life at a t! But even after due allowances have been made for all the influences of contemporary prejudice on his sensibility, there remains still in Conrad's attitude a residue of antipathy to black people which his peculiar psychology alone can explain. His own account of his first encounter with a black man is very revealing: A certain enormous buck mgger encountered in Haiti fixed my conception of blind, furious, unreasoning rage, as manifested in the human animal to the end of my days.

Of the nigger I used to dream for years afterwards Certainly, Conrad had a problem with niggers. His inordinate love of that word itself should be of interest to psychoanalysts. Sometimes his fixation on blackness is equally interesting as when he gives us this brief description: A black figure stood up, strode on long black legs, waving long black arms.

As though we might expect a black figure striding along on black legs to have white arms! But so unrelenting is Conrad's obsession. As a matter of interest Conrad gives us in A Personal Record what amounts to a companion piece to the buck nigger of Haiti. At the age of sixteen Conrad encountered his first Englishman in Europe. He calls him "my unforgettable Englishman" and describes him in the following manner: [his] calves exposed to the public gaze The light of a headlong, exalted satisfaction with the world of men illumined his face In passing he cast a glance of kindly curiosity and a friendly gleam of big, sound, shiny teeth Irrational love and irrational hate jostling together in the heart of that tormented man.

But whereas irrational love may at worst engender foolish acts of indiscretion, irrational hate can endanger the life of the community Whatever Conrad's problems were, you might say he is now safely dead. Quite true. Unfortunately, his heart of darkness plagues us still. Which is why an offensive and totally deplorable book can be described by a serious scholar as "among the half dozen greatest short novels in the English language," and why it is today perhaps the most commonly prescribed novel in the twentieth-century literature courses in our own English Department here.

Indeed the time is long overdue for a hard look at things. The first is that it is no concern of fiction to please people about whom it is written. I will go along with that. But I am not talking about pleasing people. I am talking about a book which 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.

I am talking about a story in which the very humanity of black people is called in question. It seems to me totally inconceivable that great art or even good art could possibly reside in such unwholesome surroundings. Secondly, I may be challenged on the grounds of actuality. Conrad, after all, sailed down the Congo in when my own father was still a babe in arms, and recorded what he saw.

The work was well received by a somewhat perplexed Victorian audience. It has since been called by many the best short novel written in English. At the time of its writing , the Polish-born Conrad had become a naturalized British citizen, mastered the English language, served for ten years in the British merchant marines, achieved the rank of captain, and traveled to Asia, Australia, India, and Africa.

Conrad was actually sent up the Congo River to an inner station to rescue a company agent-not named Kurtz but Georges-Antoine Klein-who died a few days later aboard ship. The story is told in the words of Charlie Marlow, a seaman, and filtered through the thoughts of an unidentified listening narrator. It is on one level about a voyage into the heart of the Belgian Congo, and on another about the Journey into the soul of man.

In , Heart of Darkness was published in a separate volume along with two other stories by Conrad. Many critics consider the book a literary bridge between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and a forerunner both of modem literary techniques and approaches to the theme of the ambiguous nature of truth, evil, and morality. By presenting the reader with a clearly unreliable narrator whose interpretation of events is often open to question, Conrad forces the reader to take an active part in the story's construction and to see and feel its events for him—or herself.

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Heart of Darkness Study Guide Next. A concise biography of Joseph Conrad plus historical and literary context for Heart of Darkness. In-depth summary and analysis of every section of Heart of Darkness. Visual theme-tracking, too. Explanations, analysis, and visualizations of Heart of Darkness 's themes.

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