Heart of Darkness - Review

Review of Heart of Darkness

College reading lists often include Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness as a must read before attending college. Such dubious honor might relegate this morality tale to boring status. The categorization is unfairly earned; Conrad created an eerie pre-psychoanalytical characterization of political powerbrokers past and to come. He draws a parallel with the Roman Empire's expansion into barbaric England and the later exploration and subjugation of areas unclaimed by civilized countries in the mid-1800s and allows a continuing parallel to current events.

In this narrative, Charlie Marlow shares his experiences on the Congo River in the Dark Continent and what he learned about human behavior. Before he leaves for his job as ship captain for a large trading company, he has a medical exam. The physician asks questions about mental stability and measures his head. "I always ask leave, in the interests of science to measure the crania of those going out there." Marlow shows slight irritation, but dismisses the intrusion into his private thoughts with typical British civility.

Just as the Dark Continent was a territory waiting to be explored, psychology was an unknown science waiting to be studied, a final frontier of understanding and mapping the human soul. Action is the external expression of dreams. Trading companies and countries claimed territory on the blank spaces on maps. Lone men staked miniscule claims for control within those boundaries.

When Marlow prepares to board ship to leave for the Dark Continent, he feels a moment of trepidation leaving society for the truly unknown. He arrives at his destination to find the boat he is to be captain of has sunk and before he can begin his job he must salvage and repair the vessel. Doing menial labor, he takes the opportunity to study and relate the actions of the people around him. He admires a man who keeps up the appearances of propriety in manners and dress. "That's backbone." He recognizes each individual's need for superiority over something. He tells of one black man, 'the reclaimed' overseeing and punishing other black prisoner workers.

With repairs completed, Marlow heads upriver to find the mysterious hero/villain Kurtz, the most successful man employed by the trading company. When he finally meets Kurtz, he realizes the terrible deeds the man has committed with threat of violence and violence itself to not only subdue the natives and force them to work for him, but to turn over their ivory and their very lives to him. He becomes the great white conqueror and despite his depravity, his peers and victims respect and revere him.

Near the beginning of the story, Marlow relays his views on telling the truth. "You know I hate, detest and can't bear a lie, not because I'm straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appals [sic] me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies." In the end, he chooses to tell Kurtz's intended bride he spoke of her in his final dying breath rather than forcing her to face the truth, she wasn't thinking of her at the last.

Feminists have argued Conrad disenfranchises female readers by presenting the Victorian Patriarchal position regarding women. "We must help them stay in that beautiful world of their own." In doing so, he shows from a man's viewpoint, a balance between power and goodness of the women behind powerful men.

After Heart of Darkness was written, the true meaning of darkness in the heart and human depravity was revealed in the horrors twentieth-century despots were willing to use to gain and keep power. Conrad's extensive description adds tension and period perspective to the classic internal and external struggles between good and evil.

Heart of Darkness with The Congo Diary

By Joseph Conrad

Edited with an introduction and notes by Robert Hampson

Penguin Twentieth Century Classics ISBN 0-14-018652-2

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