Heart of Darkness

When it was first published as a monthly serial in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1899, few readers would have predicted the worldwide fame and fierce controversy that would one day surround Joseph Conrad’s “The Heart of Darkness.” Yet over a century later the seminal novel and its message still resonates and has a profound impact on the modern reader. On a superficial level, it’s an account of ivory trading company employee Charles Marlow and his quest to locate a man named Kurtz in the heart of Africa. Yet scratch the surface and it’s a powerful metaphor for the descent into the madness that lies patiently beneath the paper-thin veneer of civilization and its assorted niceties.

As Marlow makes the long and arduous journey upriver to find the mysterious Kurt, the reader is thrown into a maelstrom where the lines separating madness from sanity become increasingly blurred. Marlow’s famous “The horror! The horror!" quote was said to refer to the atrocities Conrad witnessed firsthand in a Congo ravaged by Belgian imperialism. The fact that English was Conrad’s third language and one he often struggled with serves to add an extra hallucinatory and unsettling atmosphere to a book that contains a haunting darkness at its core.