• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

—December 20, 1902

H. L. MENCKEN

Conrad’s predilection for barbarous scenes and the more bald and shocking sort of drama has an obviously autobiographical basis. His own road ran into strange places in the days of his youth. He moved among men who were menaced by all the terrestrial cruelties, and by the almost unchecked rivalry and rapacity of their fellow men, without any appreciable barriers, whether of law, of convention or of sentimentality, to shield them. The struggle for existence, as he saw it, was well nigh as purely physical among human beings as among the carnivora of the jungle. Some of his stories, and among them his very best, are plainly little more than transcripts of his own experience. He himself is the enchanted boy of “Youth”; he is the ship-master of “Heart of Darkness”; he hovers in the background of all the island books and is visibly present in most of the tales of the sea.

—from A Book of Prefaces (1917)

CHINUA ACHEBE

Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as “the other world,” the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man’s vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality.

—from The Massachusetts Review (Winter 1977)

Questions

1. What (or where) is the heart of darkness?

2. We are told that “all Europe went into the making of Kurtz,” that he is a writer, a journalist, a painter, and a musician, as well as an explorer and colonialist. What does Conrad want to convey by making Kurtz a universal genius on the cutting edge of European civilization?

3. There are numerous doubles in Heart of Darkness: Marlow and Kurtz, the Congo and the Thames are obvious ones. Can you name others? What do these doubles—what does the very process of all this doubling—do? How does the doubling affect the reader and create meaning?

4. The cannibals, the “savages,” we are told, have incomprehensible “restraint” in the face of inconceivable temptation, whereas it is precisely “restraint” that the “civilized” Europeans lack. Can you explain this paradox?

FOR FURTHER READING

Other Selected Works of Fiction by Joseph Conrad

Almayer’s Folly (1895)

An Outcast of the Islands (1896)

The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897)

Tales of Unrest (1898)

Lord Jim (1900)

The Inheritors, with Ford Madox Ford (1901)

Youth: A Narrative; and Two Other Stories (1902)

Romance, with Ford Madox Ford (1903)

Typhoon and Other Stories (1903)

Nostromo (1904)

The Secret Agent (1907)

Under Westem Eyes (1911)

‘Twixt Land and Sea (1912)

Chance (1914)

Victory (1915)

The Shadow-Line (1917)

The Rescue (1920)

Biographies

Baines, Jocelyn. Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960. Although largely superseded by Karl’s and Najder’s biographies, this was the standard account of Conrad’s life for many years and is still useful.

Conrad, Joseph. The Mirror of the Sea (New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1906) and A Personal Record (New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1912). Memoirs of Conrad’s that are unreliable yet full of fascinating material, the latter volume especially.

Karl, Frederick R. Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives-A Biography. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1979. An extraordinarily (and sometimes overwhelmingly) detailed account of Conrad’s life.

Najder, Zdzislaw. Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle. Translated from the Polish by Halina Carroll-Najder. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983. The best of the Conrad biographies, especially on his Polish background.

Sherry, Norman. Conrad and His World. London: Thames and Hudson, 1972. A good introduction to the life and literary career of Conrad for the general reader.

Critical Studies

Achebe, Chinua. Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays. New York: Anchor Books, 1990. Contains “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” the most influential essay ever published on Conrad’s novella.

Berthoud, Jacques. Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge