The Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness: summary

Here’s a summary of the novella's main plot points:

A group of men on a boat called the Nellie off the bank of the River Thames, waiting for the tide to turn. Charlie Marlow begins to tell the story of his time in the Congo. Determined to explore the Congo region, Marlow had taken up a job with a nameless trading ‘Company’ helming a steamboat and its ivory cargo up the Congo river.

After a thirty-day trip, Marlow arrives at the mouth of the Congo River. There, he encounters men enchained and tortured, who the Company say are criminals. He meets the Company Accountant, who tells Marlow of a ‘remarkable man’ named Kurtz who sends in the most ivory out of all Company employees. When Marlow arrives at the central station, his sleazy Manager tells him that Marlow’s steamboat has sunk.

Marlow sets off to the interior station with a group of ‘cannibal’ natives onboard, who help man the ship. On the way up, a ‘roll of drums’ can often be heard, and Marlow feels like ‘going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world’.

A thick fog obstructs the view, and ‘a very loud cry’ is heard coming from its depths. Suddenly, arrows come hurtling towards the crew, one of them fatally wounding a native, Marlow’s ‘helmsman’. He thinks if the natives are attacking the crew onboard, Kurtz must surely be dead. He feels ‘sorrow’ at the thought that he ‘lost the inestimable privilege of listening to the gifted Kurtz’.

The men on the Nellie sigh at this, and Marlow gets defensive and explains why he was so fascinated by Kurtz. He says that Kurtz wrote an ‘eloquent’ report for the 'Society of the Suppression of Savage Customs' before he went mad and started participating in ‘unspeakable’ rituals with the natives. After Kurtz went mad, he added ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’ at the bottom.

Marlow returns to his story and finally, the steamboat arrives at the interior station. Marlow sees decapitated ‘heads on stakes’ outside the station and finds out that Kurtz makes the natives crawl around him.

Marlow sees Kurtz for the first time when a group of natives appears carrying the skeletal Kurtz on a stretcher. Marlow describes him as an ‘animated image of death carved out of old ivory’. The Russian, one of Kurtz’s ‘disciples’, tells Marlow to keep Kurtz’s crimes a secret when he returns to Europe to preserve his ‘reputation’.

At night, Marlow gets up to see Kurtz ‘crawling on all-fours’ back into the forest. Marlow carries him back to the boat and they leave the next day. The pilgrims shoot at the natives on the shore. One evening, a look comes over Kurtz’s face and he utters his final words, ‘The horror! The horror!’. A native boy declares ‘Mistah Kurtz - he dead’.

Marlow returns to the ‘sepulchral city’ in Europe and feels isolated, as other people don’t know all that he does. He is visited by an official-looking man, who asks for Kurtz’s writings. Marlow decides to give him the report, but leaves out ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’. Marlow visits Kurtz’s fiancée, who begs Marlow to tell her what Kurtz’s final words were. He lies and says his final words were ‘your name’.

The narrative shifts back to the present moment on the Nellie and the frame narrator remarks that the boat seemed to be heading towards ‘the heart of an immense darkness’.

Heart of Darkness: form and devices

Let’s take a deep dive into the key literary devices in Heart of Darkness.

Setting

Heart of Darkness is set in the late 19th century during the height of European imperialism in Asia and Africa. Although an exact date is not given, we can estimate that Marlow’s story is set circa 1889 to 1890, as the novella is based on Joseph Conrad's own trip to the Congo during that time. Thus the 'present-day' setting of Heart of Darkness is actually sometime later in the decade.

The novella starts out in the present-day setting of the boat Nellie on the River Thames, but the main setting is the Congo River, where Marlow’s story takes place.

The key settings of the novella are:

• The boat Nellie, off the River Thames: the present-day setting where Marlow tells his story to the crew. The narrative sometimes shifts to the Nellie when the narrator makes an observation on Marlow. The novella concludes here.
• The ‘sepulchral city’ in Europe: Marlow’s story-within-a-story begins and ends here.
• The Congo Free State, Central Africa:
• The outer station is where Marlow first lands.
• The central station is where the steamboat Marlow has to pilot to where the interior station is located.
• The interior station where Kurtz lives is deep in the Congo.

Narrative: genre, structure and narrators

Genre

Due to its short length, Heart of Darkness is considered a novella. It also has elements of the mystery and horror genres.

Marlow’s story is told orally, in quotation marks, which calls to mind the oral tradition of storytelling. We get the sense that Marlow will tell a tale of an epic quest, but this expectation is left as unfulfilled as Kurtz is ‘hollow’. This quality makes the novella a satire of an epic quest narrative.

The novella also subverts the genre of a colonial adventure story, a popular genre in the Victorian period (think Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Daniel Defoe and Treasure Island (1883) by Robert Louis Stevenson).

Structure and point of view

The novella is told through the frame narrative device with two narrators: Marlow’s narration of his story is framed by an unnamed frame narrator, who is with Marlow on the Nellie.

The novella can be said to follow a linear structure, as the unnamed narrator documents the events that happen on the Nellie from beginning to end. However, Marlow's story-within-a-story is non-linear, as his narration does not follow a chronological order, but is instead structured around his stream of consciousness.

Structure outline:

• Part I: Kurtz is only a ‘word’ and a ‘voice’ to Marlow, as he only knows bits about him from the Accountant, Manager, and Brickmaker’s accounts.
• Part II: Marlow’s obsession with meeting Kurtz takes root.
• Part III: Marlow meets Kurtz.

Narrators

The novella has two narrators, Marlow and an unnamed narrator.

Marlow

Marlow is an unreliable narrator and he makes this clear to the reader:

Marlow presents his perspective as flawed and limited from the outset of his story, as he cannot remember his time in the Congo clearly.

Unnamed narrator

The unnamed narrator on the Nellie is the one who writes down Marlow's story. We get the sense that he has been captivated by Marlow’s story, and is compelled to share it:

Could the unnamed narrator also be unreliable, if he admits being personally impacted by Marlow's story?

The Heart of Darkness Characters

Let’s take a closer look at the main characters in the novella. All the characters except Marlow and Kurtz are unnamed.

Charlie Marlow

Marlow tells the story of his time as the captain of a steamboat going up the Congo to collect ivory. At present, Marlow resembles a ‘Buddha’, sat cross-legged like he is meditating as he tells his story. He is also described as sickly with ‘sunken cheeks’ (Part I).

Marlow is critical of the cruel practices of Imperialism going on around him, stating from the outset:

Marlow gradually becomes obsessed with Kurtz, eventually saying he is his ‘devoted friend’. Although Marlow hates lies, he ends up lying to Kurtz’s fiancée when he tells her that Kurtz’s last words were her name.

Kurtz

Kurtz is a megalomaniac who has made the natives believe he is a god, when in fact he is no more than a dictator. Kurtz is a successful ivory trader and a very skilled speaker and writer. He is so persuasive that the Congolese natives and Europeans alike are entranced by him.

Kurtz wrote a report for the ‘Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs’ where he argued that the foreign white man must appear to the natives as a god, giving him immense power over them. Kurtz became power-crazed when he realised he could do anything to the natives. For example, he makes natives crawl towards him and kills those who go against him, mounting their heads on stakes.

Kurtz only recognises ‘The horror! The horror!’ of his monstrous actions in his final words (Part III).

The Accountant

The Accountant is one of the Company’s employees. Marlow meets the Accountant when he first arrives in the Congo and is amazed by his being so well-dressed and groomed.

The Accountant is obsessed with his clerical work, which makes him apathetic when a sick man is moved into his office to recover, calling it a distraction. The Accountant is the first person to bring up Kurtz to Marlow.

The Manager

The Manager lives at the central station, where Marlow first meets him. His strange smile ‘inspires uneasiness’ in Marlow because it makes everything he says sound insincere (Part I).

The Manager feels that Kurtz is a threat to his position in the Company and it is implied that the Manager sabotaged Marlow’s steamboat on purpose to starve out Kurtz.

The Russian

The Russian, or ‘the Harlequin’, is a freelance trader who lives by the inner station where Kurtz is based.

He calls himself a ‘simple man’ (Part III), and he practically worships Kurtz, whom he says has ‘enlarged’ his mind.

The Intended

The Intended is Kurtz’s fiancée, who Marlow goes to see after he has returned from the Congo. She believes she knows Kurtz best.

Heart of Darkness : themes with quotes

The novella explores a wealth of contrasting themes, such as civilisation and wilderness, reality and dream-like unreality, fascination versus repulsion, the Other, and the coloniser. For now, let’s take a deep dive into the novella’s central themes of identity and morality in relation to imperialism.

Identity: individuality, conformity, and hollowness

Heart of Darkness places importance on individuality and the ability to think independently in the novella. Characters who don’t think for themselves are depicted negatively, as they are left nameless, being called ‘the Manager’ or ‘the pilgrims’.

If you lack a strong sense of self and don’t think for yourself, you become easier to manipulate and control by people who do. The character of the Russian is a good example of this: he is blindly devoted to Kurtz, staying with him even after Kurtz threatens to kill him. He has no sense of himself and lacks independent thought, which makes him latch on to Kurtz, unable to address Kurtz’s actions critically.

Marlow admires Kurtz for his individuality, so he chooses to preserve his memory in the end. Marlow believes that there are two versions of Kurtz, the ‘original’ Kurtz and the ‘hollow’ Kurtz:

It is the ‘original’ version of Kurtz that had not yet given into dark urges, going mad with greed and power, that Marlow wants to preserve. Therefore he lies to Kurtz’s Intended. He also saves the 'noble' part of his report with the notion that the coloniser can use his power for ‘unbounded good’, but leaves out the bit written by the hollow Kurtz (‘Exterminate all the brutes!’).

Marlow also admires Kurtz’s ability to come to his own moral conclusions when he recognises the evil of his actions: ‘The horror! The horror!’ because he thinks he wouldn’t be able to do the same:

The novel's complex exploration of identity opens up many questions. Why was Marlow so drawn to Kurtz? Was his appreciation for him fuelled by madness brought on by the Congo climate? Was it wrong of Marlow to want to preserve Kurtz's memory? Why did he see merit in Kurtz's ideas?

Morality: imperialist greed and dark urges

Conrad portrays imperialism as evil and fundamentally greedy, as it is all about making a profit from an exploitative trade. The greed of imperialism makes the ‘coloniser’ cold and ruthless. The greedy Manager, Brickmaker, and Kurtz are all described as hollow inside, as if their greed had emptied their moral character to make space for material possessions.

Confronted with a wild world that they see as entirely different from their 'civilised' societies, the Congo reminds Europeans of prehistoric times, which makes them want to abandon all social and moral norms.

In the 19th century, a new understanding of the origins of humans was emerging due to Charles Darwin’s (1809-1882) theory of evolution:

• The idea that humans are animals.
• The idea that Africa was the cradle of humanity.

The wildness of the jungle and the seemingly uncivilised way of life of the natives reminds the Europeans of the ‘First Ages’ when humans behaved without regard for social and moral norms:

Marlow thinks that it is natural to feel animalistic urges, but what is important is self-restraint, which Kurtz lacked because Imperialist greed got to him.

What Marlow is saying here is that you need to have your own moral values and genuinely believe that violence is wrong, rather than just blindly following social and moral norms, as these won’t hold up when you are in the jungle without a society or government to condemn your immoral crimes.

The importance of Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness is considered one of the first Early Modernist novels, as it is written in an innovative and experimental way, marking a break from the literary traditions of the Victorians. Heart of Darkness is important because it offers a rich and complex insight into the horrors of imperialism and its impacts.

To learn more about the importance of the novel, head to our Heart of Darkness Background article.