HEART OF DARKNESS

by Joseph Conrad
Themes, Characters, Symbols, Style
THEMES
THE HYPOCRISY OF IMPERIALISM

Heart of Darkness explores the issues surrounding imperialism in complicated ways. As Marlow travels up the
river to the Inner Station, he encounters scenes of torture, cruelty, and near-slavery. The impetus behind
Marlow’s adventures, too, has to do with the hypocrisy inherent to the rhetoric used to justify imperialism. The
men who work for the Company describe what they do as “trade,” and their treatment of native Africans is part
of a benevolent project of “civilization.” Kurtz, on the other hand, does not hide the fact that he rules through
violence and intimidation, describing his own treatment of the natives with the words “suppression” and
“extermination. His perverse honesty leads to his downfall, as his success threatens to expose the evil practices
behind European activity in Africa.
For Marlow, the Africans in this book are mostly objects, a human screen against which he can play out his
philosophical and existential struggles. Their existence and their exoticism enable his self-contemplation. This
kind of dehumanization is harder to identify than colonial violence or open racism.
MADNESS AS A RESULT OF IMPERIALISM

Madness is closely linked to imperialism in this book. Madness has two primary functions. First, it serves as an
ironic device to engage the reader’s sympathies. Kurtz, Marlow is told from the beginning, is mad. However, as
Marlow, and the reader, begin to form a more complete picture of Kurtz, it becomes apparent that his madness is
only relative, that in the context of the Company insanity is difficult to define. Thus, both Marlow and the reader
begin to sympathize with Kurtz and view the Company with suspicion. Madness also functions to establish the
necessity of social fictions. Although social mores and explanatory justifications are shown throughout Heart of
Darkness to be utterly false and even leading to evil, they are nevertheless necessary for both group harmony and
individual security. Madness, in Heart of Darkness, is the result of being removed from one’s social context and
allowed to be the sole arbiter of one’s own actions. Madness is thus linked not only to absolute power and a kind of
moral genius but to man’s fundamental fallibility: Kurtz has no authority to whom he answers but himself, and this
is more than any one man can bear.
THE ABSURDITY OF EVIL

This novella is, above all, an exploration of hypocrisy, ambiguity, and moral confusion. It explodes the idea of the
proverbial choice between the lesser of two evils. As the idealistic Marlow is forced to align himself with either the
hypocritical and malicious colonial bureaucracy or the openly malevolent, rule-defying Kurtz, it becomes increasingly
clear that to try to judge either alternative is an act of folly: how can moral standards or social values be relevant in
judging evil? Is there such thing as insanity in a world that has already gone insane? The number of ridiculous situations
Marlow witnesses act as reflections of the larger issue: at one station, for instance, he sees a man trying to carry water in
a bucket with a large hole in it. At the Outer Station, he watches native laborers blast away at a hillside with no particular
goal in mind. The absurd involves both insignificant silliness and life-or-death issues, often simultaneously. That the
serious and the mundane are treated similarly suggests a profound moral confusion and a tremendous hypocrisy: it is

terrifying that Kurtz’s homicidal megalomania and a leaky bucket provoke essentially the same reaction from Marlow.
FUTILITY

Several images throughout Heart of Darkness suggest the futility of European presence in Africa. The first such image
Marlow witnesses off the West African coast, where a French warship fires pointlessly at an invisible enemy. Another
image appears later, at the Central Station, when Marlow watches as frantic Europeans pointlessly attempt to extinguish
a burning grass hut. In addition to these instances of useless action, Marlow takes note of pointless labor practices at
the Company Station. There he observes white Europeans forcing Africans to blast a hole through a cliff for no apparent
reason. He also nearly falls into a random hole in the ground that slave laborers dug. Marlow speculates that the hole
has no purpose other than to occupy the slaves: “It might have been connected with the philanthropic desire of giving
the criminals something to do.” As with the examples of the warship and the grass hut, the grossly inefficient labor
practices at the Company Station suggest the pointlessness of the European mission in Africa.
CONTRADICTION AND AMBIVALENCE

Contradictions appear everywhere in Heart of Darkness, and particularly with respect to European characters, who
serve as living embodiments of imperialism. European imperial missions sought to civilize “savage” peoples and hence
appeared pure in their intentions, but all too often they inflicted terrible violence instead. Contradictions also abound
in Marlow’s outlook on colonialism, as well as in his ambivalent views on life. He opens his story by describing his
belief in the “idea” of colonialism, yet he goes on to tell a long story about the horrors of the Belgian mission in the
Congo. The evident contradiction between the idea of colonialism and its reality doesn’t seem to bother Marlow. A
similar tension affects Marlow’s treatment of Africans. He finds it repulsive that Europeans mistreat African laborers at
the stations along the river. However, Marlow fails to see Africans as equals. A further contradiction permeates the
grim outlook that Marlow expresses near the novella’s end. According to Marlow, life is at once full of “merciless logic”
and yet has a completely “futile purpose”—that is, it is at once meaningful and meaningless.
HOLLOWNESS

Throughout his journey, Marlow meets an array of people characterized by their hollow emptiness,
reflecting the way imperialism robbed Europeans of moral substance. Marlow refers to the chatty
brickmaker he meets at the Central Station as a “papier-mâché Mephistopheles” who has “nothing
inside but a little loose dirt, maybe.” Like a nut without the kernel, the brickmaker’s speech is all
form and no content, revealing his obvious idleness. Marlow speaks of Kurtz in similar terms.
Marlow comes to this realization of Kurtz’s emptiness after observing the severed African heads on
stakes, placed there for no apparent reason. Like the brickmaker, Kurtz is showy with his talk but
ultimately doesn’t have much reason, since all his ideas are morally bankrupt. Marlow develops this
notion of Kurtz as a hollow man later in the story. Although he continues to speak forcefully, Kurtz’s
physical body wastes away, making the man a “hollow sham,” or imitation, of his former self.
MOTIFS

Observation and Eavesdropping

Marlow gains a great deal of information by watching the world around him and by overhearing others’
conversations, as when he listens from the deck of the wrecked steamer to the manager of the Central Station
and his uncle discussing Kurtz and the Russian trader. This phenomenon speaks to the impossibility of direct
communication between individuals: information must come as the result of chance observation and astute
interpretation. Words themselves fail to capture meaning adequately, and thus they must be taken in the
context of their utterance. Another good example of this is Marlow’s conversation with the brickmaker, during
which Marlow is able to figure out a good deal more than simply what the man has to say.
DARKNESS

Darkness is important enough conceptually to be part of the book’s title. However, it is difficult to discern
exactly what it might mean, given that absolutely everything in the book is cloaked in darkness. Africa, England,
and Brussels are all described as gloomy and somehow dark, even if the sun is shining brightly. Darkness thus
seems to operate metaphorically and existentially rather than specifically. Darkness is the inability to see: this
may sound simple, but as a description of the human condition it has profound implications. Failing to see
another human being means failing to understand that individual and failing to establish any sort of
sympathetic communion with him or her.
Character: MARLOW

Marlow serves as the protagonist of Heart of Darkness, and most of the novella features him telling his own story
from his own perspective. Marlow’s experience involves him traveling deep into the heart of colonial Africa and
witnessing horrors that force him to reevaluate his faith in European imperialism and its civilizing mission. As Marlow
explains to the crew of the Nellie, prior to traveling in the Congo he believed that “the devotion to efficiency” could
redeem colonialism, preventing it from becoming mere “robbery with violence.” However, as he journeys down the
Congo River and encounters the on-the-ground reality at various company stations along the way, he is physically and
mentally antagonized by gross incompetence paired with inhumane treatment of Africans. Marlow’s physical and
psychological journey therefore stages the novella’s central theme of the moral bankruptcy of Europe and its
imperialist activities. Following Kurtz’s death, Marlow experiences the full effects of his crisis of faith when he must
choose what to reveal and what to conceal about Kurtz to Kurtz’s fiancée. With this choice, Marlow wrestles with the
proper response to immorality, and ultimately chooses to protect her from the darkness that has consumed.
KURTZ

The primary antagonist is Kurtz, whose descent into madness makes him the clearest embodiment of
corruption and evil in the novella, and ultimately the character that fully disillusions Marlow in regard to
European conquests. Even though Kurtz does not make his brief appearance until late in the story, his
specter haunts Marlow long before and long after their encounter.
At the Central Station he observes a painting Kurtz made of a blindfolded woman holding a torch in the
darkness. Kurtz’s painting clearly endorses the civilizing mission of European imperialism, which seeks to
bring European enlightenment to the dark wilderness of Africa. Marlow explains that Kurtz also endorsed
imperialism in a pamphlet.However, Marlow’s copy of the pamphlet bears a handwritten postscript:
“Exterminate all the brutes!” The sheer violence of this postscript indicates Kurtz’s descent into madness as
well as the radicalization of his philosophy.

By extension, the corrosion of Kurtz’s psychology also mirrors the breakdown of the logic behind European
imperialism. Kurtz set out with good intentions on behalf of the Company, but ended up consumed by
violent desires and greed. The logic of imperialism is plagued by a similar contradiction: supposedly a
civilizing mission, yet conducted with savage violence; supposedly an enterprise based on the efficient
KURTZ

Marlow believed that the loneliness and unfamiliarity of the African environment induces Kurtz’s madness, and that
his mind weakens the deeper he travels into the “heart of darkness.” Another possibility for Kurtz’s madness is that
Kurtz’s greed drives him crazy. After Kurtz discovers the influence he has over the indigenous people, his insatiable
lust for power takes him over the edge. In the Congolese jungle, Kurtz is not held accountable to anyone, and this
sort of unrestrained power is more than one man can bear.

Kurtz’s last words—“The horror! The horror!”—can be ow suggests interpreted in various ways. Firstly, and most
simply, they could be a response to a fever dream as Kurtz’s body and mind disintegrate. More likely, these words
reflect Kurtz’s failure to achieve his many lofty goals and fulfill his destiny, and he cannot help but utter in despair as
the emptiness of his own life envelopes him. These final words could also broadly symbolize the horror of Belgian
(and European) colonialism. Marlow interprets the exclamation as Kurtz’s response to his impending death. Each of

these meanings coexist uneasily in Kurtz’s last words.

Heart of Darkness primarily takes place in the late nineteenth century in the Belgian-controlled Congo Free State.. At that time, Europe

controlled immense empires around the world, and places like the Congo were subject to horrific violence in the service of stripping away and

exporting massive amounts of natural resources. In the Belgian Congo, traders forced Africans into slavery to support the extraction of ivory

for an expanding global market. Marlow’s journey into the Congolese interior progressively exposes the violence and greed of fellow

representatives of the Company, the Belgian enterprise. However, even though European empires were at their peak, many Europeans

remained in the dark about the colonies and what happened there. Marlow indicates as much early in the novella.Marlow’s discussion of the

“blank spaces” on the map demonstrates how, to those at home in Europe, the colonies appeared to be places of obscurity and darkness.

Most of the action happens in Africa, but Heart of Darkness begins and ends in a boat on the River Thames, just outside of London. In the

novella’s second paragraph, the narrator describes a dark, ominous cloud that hangs over London: There is clear irony here, with the insistence

on London’s greatness. By opening and closing the novella in this way, Conrad suggests that Africa may not be the real heart of darkness after

all. Perhaps London—and, by extension, all of Europe’s great towns—are the real centers of darkness.
STYLE

Conrad possesses an effectively descriptive style. He chooses the right details to make the story come alive rather than

use excessive detail. He also has a dark sense of humor, which lends readability to this otherwise grave tale.

Conrad's choice to tell this story as a frame story helps the reader feel as if he or she is listening to a sea yarn rather

than reading a book. This choice also allows the narrator to comment on the story and on Marlow, and should not be

ignored since it is Conrad who is ultimately the storyteller. This method allows Conrad to cue the reader how to

examine the tale without too much authorial intrusion. Conrad produced a tightly woven, psychologically complex

novella with this work, and that is a testament to his superb writing skill.

The novella begins with the first-person narration of a character the reader never learns much about. One reason

Conrad might have set the novella up in this fashion is to put some distance between the reader and Marlow, perhaps

to increase the effectiveness of Marlow's character.

In relating the evil and a rather pessimistic state of affairs of human civilization in Africa, Conrad uses the

impressionistic style to relate the story. We, primarily, move forward with the character of Marlow. His eyes

becomes our guide and his thinking faculty our bent of mind. For Conrad, a novel is "an impression conveyed

through the senses". In fact under the persona of Marlow, Conrad himself is relating the story of pain, misery

and unbearable truth of human existence. All of this roots from the imperialistic practices and the primitive

rituals still prevalent in the African society. The industrial and imperialistic forces merely further polluted and

exploited the already horribly awe stricken African countries. With the use of impressionistic technique, the

author has been able to share his personal experiences of human barbarianism in Congo. Conrad uses dialogue

to brighten and enliven his characters:the descriptions are narrated as well as revealed in dialogue. In "Heart

of Darkness", it is the character of Marlow that speaks and leads the audience to form a conception of the

human civilization which is dying in the wilderness of the primitive Congo.

Conrad’s novel certainly carry a melodramatic touch. Along with the characters like Kurtz, he does create extreme situations. For instance, in the

"Heart of Darkness", the author has created a new world which is totally opposite in appearance and meaning to the one the human civilization is

proud of. In "Heart of Darkness", the journey of Marlow is the venturing into the land of darkness from the land of the sun. The author gives such

vivid description to the landscape that on the physical level it is certain for the travellers that they are moving from light, Europe, into darkness,

Africa. The novel is replete with such images which create the sense of hopelessness, plotting and rule of evil in Congo. Like all modern writers,

Conrad has skillfully employed symbolic use of language to effectively carry the themes to the readers. "Ivory" is symbolic of the greed of

Europeans. Kurtz' painting of a blindfolded woman symbolizes the Europeans are either blind or have turned indifferent to the impacts of their

deeds in Africa, the distorted face of the woman reflects the distorted moral standing of the Europeans that came to Congo with the claims of

civilization. This is ironic that a blindfolded nation bears light with the claim to rescue the African which indeed they never wanted to. Kurtz is

symbolic of the darker side of man. Marlow symbolizes the learning curve of man and European civilization.