Originally published in April 1899, ‘Heart of Darkness’ is a classic novel that inspired Apocalypse Now by Joseph Conrad, a Polish-British writer viewed as one of the most remarkable novelists to write in the English language.
The novel tells the story of Charles Marlow, an English man who journeys into the African jungle. The difference between Conrad’s novella and other classic adventure fiction, like Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, is that it goes beyond classic motifs of discovery and exploration to explicitly deal with questions of racism, exploitation, and colonization.
Marlow’s mission in the story is to transport ivory and to take Kurtz, an experienced ivory trader, back to Europe. The occurrences in the African jungle are sandwiched by two scenes aboard a ship anchored in the Thames, where Marlow reveals the details of his adventures to a group of friends. The darkness of the bloody happenings that Marlow witnesses during his journey parallel the fall of dusk on the Thames as the story is being told. In Africa, Marlow is mainly disgusted with white men’s shallowness and mischievous behavior with natives.
The readers eventually understand that the darkness of the title does not only stand for the horrors in the African wilderness but mainly for the cruelty of the colonizer’s heart.