Heart of Darkness
Heart of Darkness is a novella by Polish-English novelist Joseph Conrad. It tells the story of Charles Marlow, a sailor who takes on an assignment from a Belgian trading company as a ferry-boat captain in the African interior. The novel is widely regarded as a critique of European colonial rule in Africa, whilst also examining the themes of power dynamics and morality. Although Conrad does not name the river where the narrative takes place, at the time of writing the Congo Free State, the location of the large and economically important Congo River, was a private colony of Belgium's King Leopold II. Marlow is given a text by Kurtz, an ivory trader working on a trading station far up the river, who has "gone native" and is the object of Marlow's expedition.
The novella was not a big success during Conrad's life. When it was published as a single volume in 1902 with two novellas, "Youth" and "The End of the Tether", it received the least commentary from critics. F. R. Leavis referred to Heart of Darkness as a "minor work" and criticised its "adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensible mystery". Conrad did not consider it to be particularly notable; but by the 1960s it was a standard assignment in many college and high school English courses. Literary critic Harold Bloom wrote that Heart of Darkness had been analysed more than any other work of literature that is studied in universities and colleges, which he attributed to Conrad's "unique propensity for ambiguity". The French philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe called Heart of Darkness "one of the greatest texts of Western literature" and used Conrad's tale for a reflection on "The Horror of the West".
Originally issued as a three-part serial story in Blackwood's Magazine to celebrate the thousandth edition of the magazine, Heart of Darkness has been widely re-published and translated into many languages. It provided the inspiration for Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 film Apocalypse Now. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Heart of Darkness 67th on their list of the 100 best novels in English of the twentieth century.
Excerpted from Heart of Darkness on Wikipedia.
Heart of Darkness
| Author | Joseph Conrad |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Genre | Historical fiction, Adventure, Literary fiction, Modernist Novel, Philosophical fiction, Existentialist novels |
| Copyright | Public domain in the United States. |
| Book cover | - |
| Ebooks | Project Gutenberg. |
| Scans | Google-digitized. |
| Audio | Librivox | Internet Archive Reader: Kristin LeMoine 1a 1b 2a 2b 3a 3b |
| Read online | Heart of Darkness |