Heart Of Darkness

Heart of Darkness is a novella written by Joseph Conrad. It is widely regarded as a significant
work of English literature and part of the Western canon. The story tells of Charles Marlow, an
Englishman who took a foreign assignment from a Belgian trading company as a ferry-boat
captain in Africa. Heart of Darkness exposes the myth behind colonization while exploring the
three levels of darkness that the protagonist, Marlow, encounters--the darkness of the Congo
wilderness, the darkness of the European's cruel treatment of the natives, and the unfathomable
darkness within every human being for committing heinous acts of evil. Although Conrad does
not give the name of the river, at the time of writing the Congo Free State, the location of the
large and important Congo River, was a private colony of Belgium's King Leopold II. Marlow is
employed to transport ivory downriver. However, his more pressing assignment is to return Kurtz,
another ivory trader, to civilization, in a cover-up. Kurtz has a reputation throughout the region.
This symbolic story is a story within a story or frame narrative. It follows Marlow as he recounts
from dusk through to late night, to a group of men aboard a ship anchored in the Thames Estuary
his Congolese adventure. The passage of time and the darkening sky during the fictitious
narrative-within-the-narrative parallel the atmosphere of the story.