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On a boat anchored in the Thames at dusk, the sailor Marlow tells his friends of the time he went up the Congo River as the captain of a steamer for a…
On a boat anchored in the Thames at dusk, the sailor Marlow tells his friends of the time he went up the Congo River as the captain of a steamer for a Belgian trading company. At the company's stations he sees chained workers, men dying of hunger in the shade and officials interested only in ivory, and he hears again and again of Mr Kurtz, the company's most brilliant agent, deep in the interior. When Marlow finally reaches him, Kurtz is dying, surrounded by the heads of his victims on stakes, and his last words are 'The horror! The horror!'
Context and significance
Joseph Conrad, born in Poland and writing in English, his third language, had himself captained a Congo river steamer in 1890; the novella was serialised in 1899. It is a searching picture of the greed of empire, but the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe famously criticised its portrayal of Africans, and readers still debate both views. Francis Ford Coppola transposed it to Vietnam in Apocalypse Now. Marlow also narrates Lord Jim.
About the author
Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) was born Józef Korzeniowski to Polish parents in today's Ukraine. His father was exiled for patriotic activities, and Conrad was orphaned at eleven. At sixteen he went to sea from Marseille, and he spent twenty years as a sailor, rising to captain in the British merchant navy.
A voyage up the Congo in 1890 marked him for life and led to Heart of Darkness. He began writing in English, his third language, and became one of its great novelists with Lord Jim and Nostromo. His books ask what people do when no one is watching.