essay heart of darkness themes

Heart of Darkness Themes

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Heart of Darkness: Analysis and Themes

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

First published in 1899, Heart of Darkness – which formed the basis of the 1979 Vietnam war film Apocalypse Now – is one of the first recognisably modernist works of literature in English fiction. Its author was the Polish-born Joseph Conrad, and English wasn’t his first language (or even, for that matter, his second).

As well as being a landmark work of modernism, Conrad’s novella also explores the subject of imperialism, and Conrad’s treatment of this subject has been met with both criticism and praise.

In this post, we’ll offer an analysis of Heart of Darkness in relation to these two key ideas: modernism and imperialism.

The Problem of Storytelling

In a letter of 5 August 1897 to his friend Cunninghame Graham, Joseph Conrad wrote: ‘One writes only half the book – the other half is with the reader.’

In other words, a book should leave the reader with room to manoeuvre: it should be, to borrow Hilary Mantel’s phrase, a book of questions rather than a book of answers. The reader makes up the meaning of the book as much as the writer. This is a key feature of modernist fiction, which is often impressionistic : giving us glimpses and hints but refusing to spell everything out to the reader.

With this in mind, it’s worth considering the moments when Marlow stops and interrupts the tried and tested literary framework of the novella. One of the questions which it’s very easy to trick people out with is the question, ‘Who is the narrator of Heart of Darkness?’ ‘Why, Marlow, of course!’

Except the narrator is not Marlow – not the main narrator, anyway. Marlow doesn’t address us , the reader; he addresses his friends on the boat, the Nellie , and then there is an unnamed narrator, one of the other people on the boat listening to Marlow, and it’s this unnamed individual who addresses us in his role as the conventional narrator.

And Marlow, who tells the story to the real narrator and his companions, cannot just sit and tell it. He has to check with his audience that they are ‘getting it’; and they’re not getting it, at least not fully. They’re having to work hard to ‘see’ what he’s recounting to them. That is, there’s a constant anxiety on Marlow’s part as to whether his audience – his ‘readers’, as it were – are understanding the story he’s telling them.

Marlow interrupts his narrative several times, at least once simply because he is despairing of the efficacy of his own storytelling technique. It’s the literary equivalent of ‘breaking the fourth wall’ – we may just about be beginning to imagine the scene in the heart of Africa when suddenly our imagination is jolted back to Marlow, sitting in a boat on the Thames.

We’re not invited to get too cosy with Marlow’s narrative, and not just because of the dark events he’s describing: the way he describes them is constantly making us question what we are being told:

Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream—making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams …

Note the subtle play on the word ‘relation’ here, where as well as meaning ‘the telling of a dream’ (relating a story to someone), it also glimmers with the other meaning of ‘relation’, i.e., one who is related to us, such as a brother or sister. It is as if fiction, stories, are the cousins of dreams, in that they’re both narratives that are at once both vividly and yet only dimly remembered. That is, you remember some aspects of dreams vividly, and others only hazily.

And ‘hazily’ is just the word. Note how the narrator describes Marlow’s way of telling a story, in a passage from Heart of Darkness that has become famous:

But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.

This passage pinpoints what Conrad is doing with Heart of Darkness : using the framework or basic structure of many an imperial adventure story of the late nineteenth century ( Heart of Darkness was originally serialised in Blackwood’s Magazine , which was known for its gung-ho tales set in exotic parts of the world which were under European imperial rule), but undermining it by questioning the very basis on which such stories are founded.

Language, as the multilingual Conrad knew, is an imperfect and flawed tool for conveying our experiences.

Delayed Decoding

‘Delayed decoding’ is Ian Watt’s term for the moments in Conrad’s fiction where the narrator withholds information from us so that we have to work out what’s going on bit by bit, just as the narrator himself (and it is always a him self with Conrad) had to at the time. As Watt himself writes, delayed decoding serves ‘mainly to put the reader in the position of being an immediate witness of each step in the process’.

It’s as if you were there, and as confused and bewildered by it all as the narrator himself was. A good example is the moment when Marlow comes upon the abandoned hut in the jungle, and finds a strange book on the ground which contains notes pencilled in the margins which, he tells us, appear to be written in cipher, or code.

He – and we – later find out that it’s not written in code, but Russian. He makes us wait until the point in the narrative when he found out his mistake before he corrects it. This has two effects: it brings us closer to Marlow’s own experience (we learn things as we go along, just as he did at the time), but it also makes us work harder as readers, since we are encouraged to appraise carefully everything we are told. We can’t trust anything we read.

Much modernist fiction may be written in the past tense, as Heart of Darkness is, but a good deal of modernist fiction is narrated as though it were written in the present tense . That is, it wants to recreate the immediacy of the experience, the way it felt for the character/narrator as it happened .

It’s as if it doesn’t trust the overly neat brand of hindsight which is offered by the traditional Victorian novel written in the perfect (past) tense. Delayed decoding is one of the chief ways that Conrad goes about recreating the ‘presentness’ of Marlow’s experience, the sense of what it was like for him – surrounded by things he’s only half-figured out – as these things were happening to him.

The literary critic F. R. Leavis, who was otherwise a great admirer of Conrad, remarked that Conrad often seemed ‘intent on making a virtue out of not knowing what he means.’ Certainly Conrad seems to enjoy uncertainty, obscurity – darkness, if you will, like the Heart of Darkness .

In The English Novel: An Introduction , Terry Eagleton remarks that Conrad’s prose is both vivid or concrete and ambiguous or equivocal. It’s like describing mist in very precise terms, or depicting something as solid and tangible as a spear in terms which seem to make it melt into the air. This takes us back to Marlow’s own comparison between the story he is telling his companions and the experience of a dream.

Heart of Darkness and imperialism

Imperialism is an important theme of Heart of Darkness , but this, too, is treated in both vivid yet ambiguous or hazy terms. As Eagleton observes, the problems with Conrad’s treatment of imperialism are several: first, his depiction of African natives comes across as stereotyped and insufficient (a criticism that Chinua Achebe memorably made), but second, Conrad depicts the whole imperialist mission as irrational and borderline mad.

This overlooks the Enlightenment rationalism that underpinned the European imperial mission: colonialists used their belief in their ‘superior’ reason as an excuse for enslaving other peoples are taking their resources.

This belief may have been misguided and immoral, but it was hardly ‘irrational’: to depict it as such rather lets imperialists off the hook for their crimes, as if they were not in their right minds when they committed their atrocities or plundered other nations for their wealth.

However, when compared with other writers of his period, Conrad can be viewed as a more thoughtful writer on empire than many other late nineteenth-century authors. Consider Marlow’s account of the dying African natives:

They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now – nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom. … Then, glancing down, I saw a face near my hand. The black bones reclined at full length with one shoulder against the tree, and slowly the eyelids rose and the sunken eyes looked up at me, enormous and vacant, a kind of blind, white flicker in the depths of the orbs, which died out slowly.

This passage continues:

He had tied a bit of white worsted round his neck – Why? Where did he get it? Was it a badge – an ornament – a charm – a propitiatory act? Was there any idea at all connected with it? It looked startling round his black neck, this bit of white thread from beyond the seas.

Marlow is ‘horror-struck’ by the sight of these starving people, although he does go on to describe them as ‘creatures’, which strikes a discordant note to our modern ears. But it’s clear that Marlow is appalled by the plight of the natives where many colonialists of the time would have simply stepped over the bodies as an inconvenience.

From this, Marlow turns to describing the next European he meets:

When near the buildings I met a white man, in such an unexpected elegance of get-up that in the first moment I took him for a sort of vision. I saw a high starched collar, white cuffs, a light alpaca jacket, snowy trousers, a clean necktie, and varnished boots. No hat. Hair parted, brushed, oiled, under a green-lined parasol held in a big white hand. He was amazing, and had a penholder behind his ear.

The contrast could not be clearer. The ‘greenish gloom’ in which the dying African youth fades away has become that thing of comfort: the European’s ‘green-lined parasol’. The ‘bit of white worsted’ tied around the African’s neck is replaced by the ‘clean necktie’ of the colonialist.

Of course, the novella’s ultimate depiction of the corruption at the heart of the imperial mission is Mr Kurtz himself, who has set himself up as a god among the African natives. An fundamentally, here we are presented with more questions than answers. Kurtz is driven mad by it all – there’s imperialism as an irrational undertaking again – but what is equally telling is Marlow’s decision to lie to Kurtz’s fiancée when he visits her at the end of Heart of Darkness .

Is it because, to borrow Kurtz’s final words, ‘the horror’ would be too great? Is it an act of sympathy or cowardice: is Marlow complicit in the horrors of imperialism in continuing to insulate those ‘back home’ from the atrocities which are carried out abroad so that, for instance, Kurtz’s fiancée can have that ‘grand piano’ (with its ivory keys, of course) standing in the corner of a room ‘like a sombre and polished sarcophagus’?

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2 thoughts on “Heart of Darkness: Analysis and Themes”

Your analysis of Heart of Darkness was well written and held my interest throughout. Thank you!

A Conrad fan

It was perfectly possible to be both anti-imperialist and racist when Conrad wrote “Heart of Darkness”. “Race” was used in a much wider and vaguer sense than the word would be used now – where we would attribute something to “culture”, Conrad and his contemporaries attributed it to “race”. People spoke of the “races” of England. Josef Škvorecký examines the presence of the Russian Harlequin in Kurtz’s outpost in his novel “The Engineer of Human Souls” and in an essay “Why the Harlequin?” https://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/crossc/ANW0935.1984.001/269:21?rgn=author;view=image;q1=Skvorecky%2C+Josef

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• Heart of Darkness: Summary: Part I
• Heart of Darkness: Novel Summary: Part I
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Heart of Darkness: Theme Analysis

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The Pervasiveness of Darkness Perhaps the strongest theme in the novel is that of darkness.  Indeed, darkness seems to pervade the work.  Marlow's tale begins and ends in literal darkness; the setting of the novel is often dark, such as when the steamboat is socked in by fog or when Marlow retrieves Kurtz; dark-skinned individuals inhabit the entire region; and, of course, there is a certain philosophical darkness that permeates the work.  But within the tale darkness operates in several ways.  As any child knows, darkness symbolizes the unknown; it gains its power from its ability to conceal things we are too frightened to face.  Several times in the novel we see characters afraid, not of the darkness itself, but of that which potentially lies within it.  One of the most alarming scenes occurs when the men aboard the fog-bound steamer hear a shrill cry from somewhere around them.  It is particularly frightening because the men know some potential threat is near, but they cannot see it; it is simply out there in the darkness, waiting.  Darkness also effectively conceals certain savage acts.  It is possible to operate in the cover of region's darkness in ways that would not be possible in the more civilized Europe.  For example, when the Manager suggests that the "scoundrel," who is suspected of helping Kurtz procure his ivory, should be hanged as an example, his uncle agrees, noting that such actions are possible in the Congo, a region far from the "light" of civilized action.  And Kurtz's most disturbing act, the placement of human heads atop poles surrounding his station house, is only possible in the concealed Congo.  Of course, darkness is also very compelling.  Despite the fear it induces, there are plenty of men who are willing to brave it for its potential rewards.  For the company men, the incentive is material wealth in the form of ivory.  There are, however, other rewards.  Marlow travels to the region because of a map he sees, which lists the area as one of the few largely uncharted lands left.  To him, the Congo is a place to undertake a great adventure.  The Harlequin is a physical and spiritual wanderer, and through Kurtz and his dark station, his mind has been "enlarged" he has found a sense of purpose.  The character who most fully embraces the darkness is, of course, Kurtz.  He has been completely transformed by his experience in the Congo.  He has looked deeply within himself and has seen his own potential for savagery, yet he has accepted it.  The Europeans try to push back the darkness, if only temporarily, through their white clothes, adherence to European customs and morals, and technological advances, like the steamboat and the railroad.  But the novel argues that the darkness is too enveloping.  In the preface to his tale, Marlow remarks that London was once "one of the dark places of the earth." Later he sees how quickly the jungle reclaims its territory.  When he locates the remains of his predecessor, Captain Fresleven, who died in an argument with a native chief, he notes that "the grass growing through his ribs was tall enough to hide his bones." These remarks suggest that in time Europe too will be reclaimed by wild.  The light of civilization with someday return to darkness.  Colonization as Destruction Another major theme in the novel is the notion of colonization as a destructive, rather than constructive, force.  Kurtz's initial approach to colonization is very altruistic; he believes that each company station "'should be like a beacon on the road toward better things, a center for trade of course but also for humanising, improving, instructing.'" Kurtz is not alone in this philosophy.  The International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs, which commissions Kurtz to write a report, is likely an organization that believes in "civilizing" the inhabitants of Congo.  Even Marlow's aunt, who helps to secure his position, is pleased that her nephew will help in "weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways." Of course, the reality of colonization is very bleak.  As Marlow comments: "The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much." Marlow sees firsthand the cold truth of colonization: physically wasted workers operating in deplorable conditions, backstabbing co-workers jockeying for the most profit and recognition, and a colonized people literally being shackled.  It's as if the company is a steamroller plowing through the jungle, flattening anything and anyone that happens to be in the way, all, of course, in the name of profit.  The Manager condemns Kurtz for his "unsound" methods, yet in one sense Kurtz has achieved the ultimate form of colonization: the natives actually worship him.  As a result, he brings in the most ivory.  Of course, it is at Kurtz's station where Marlow sees the greatest act of savagery, the placement of the decapitated heads of "rebels" atop poles.  By the time Marlow encounters Kurtz, Kurtz no longer has any noble intentions; instead he feels the need to "Exterminate all the brutes!'"  Colonization may help to maintain the surface luster of the home country, but there are no benefits for those being colonized, only hardship, suffering, and death. 

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Heart of Darkness

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Heart of Darkness , novella by Joseph Conrad that was first published in 1899 in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and then in Conrad’s Youth: and Two Other Stories (1902). Heart of Darkness examines the horrors of Western colonialism , depicting it as a phenomenon that tarnishes not only the lands and peoples it exploits but also those in the West who advance it. Although garnering an initially lacklustre reception, Conrad’s semiautobiographical tale has gone on to become one of the most widely analyzed works of English literature . Critics have not always treated Heart of Darkness favourably, rebuking its dehumanizing representation of colonized peoples and its dismissive treatment of women. Nonetheless, Heart of Darkness has endured, and today it stands as a Modernist masterpiece directly engaged with postcolonial realities.

Heart of Darkness tells a story within a story. The novella begins with a group of passengers aboard a boat floating on the River Thames . One of them, Charlie Marlow, relates to his fellow seafarers an experience of his that took place on another river altogether—the Congo River in Africa. Marlow’s story begins in what he calls the “sepulchral city,” somewhere in Europe. There “the Company”—an unnamed organization running a colonial enterprise in the Belgian Congo —appoints him captain of a river steamer. He sets out for Africa optimistic of what he will find.

But his expectations are quickly soured. From the moment he arrives, he is exposed to the evil of imperialism , witnessing the violence it inflicts upon the African people it exploits. As he proceeds, he begins to hear tell of a man named Kurtz —a colonial agent who is supposedly unmatched in his ability to procure ivory from the continent’s interior. According to rumour Kurtz has fallen ill (and perhaps mad as well), thereby jeopardizing the Company’s entire venture in the Congo.

Marlow is given command of his steamer and a crew of Europeans and Africans to man it, the latter of whom Conrad shamelessly stereotypes as “cannibals.” As he penetrates deeper into the jungle, it becomes clear that his surroundings are impacting him psychologically: his journey is not only into a geographical “heart of darkness” but into his own psychic interior—and perhaps into the darkened psychic interior of Western civilization as well.

After encountering many obstacles along the way, Marlow’s steamer finally makes it to Kurtz. Kurtz has taken command over a tribe of natives who he now employs to conduct raids on the surrounding regions. The man is clearly ill, physically and psychologically. Marlow has to threaten him to go along with them, so intent is Kurtz on executing his “immense plans.” As the steamer turns back the way it came, Marlow’s crew fires upon the group of indigenous people previously under Kurtz’s sway, which includes a queen-figure described by Conrad with much eroticism and as exoticism.

Kurtz dies on the journey back up the river but not before revealing to Marlow the terrifying glimpse of human evil he’d been exposed to. “The horror! The horror!” he tells Marlow before dying. Marlow almost dies as well, but he makes it back to the sepulchral city to recuperate. He is disdainful of the petty tribulations of Western civilization that seem to occupy everyone around him. As he heals, he is visited by various characters from Kurtz’s former life—the life he led before finding the dark interior of himself in Africa.

A year after his return to Europe, Marlow pays Kurtz’s partner a visit. She is represented—as several of Heart of Darkness ’s female characters are—as naively sheltered from the awfulness of the world, a state that Marlow hopes to preserve. When she asks about Kurtz’s final words, Marlow lies: “your name,” he tells her. Marlow’s story ends there. Heart of Darkness itself ends as the narrator, one of Marlow’s audience, sees a mass of brooding clouds gathering on the horizon—what seems to him to be “heart of an immense darkness.”

Heart of Darkness was published in 1902 as a novella in Youth: And Two Other Stories , a collection which included two other stories by Conrad. But the text first appeared in 1899 in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine , a literary monthly on its thousandth issue, to which its editor invited Conrad to contribute. Conrad was hesitant to do so, perhaps for good reason—although Heart of Darkness received acclaim among his own literary circle, the story failed to secure any kind of popular success. That remained the case even when it was published in 1902; Heart of Darkness received the least attention out of the three stories included, and the collection was eponymously named after another one of the stories altogether. Conrad didn’t live long enough to see it become a popular success.

Heart of Darkness first began garnering academic attention in the 1940 and ’50s, at a time when literary studies were dominated by a psychologically oriented approach to the interpretation of literature. Heart of Darkness was, accordingly, understood as a universalist exploration of human interiority—of its corruptibility, its inaccessibility, and the darkness inherent to it. There was something lacking in these critiques , of course: any kind of examination of the novella’s message about colonialism or its use of Africa and its people as an indistinct backdrop against which to explore the complexities of the white psyche.

That changed in the 1970s when Chinua Achebe , the Nigerian author of Things Fall Apart , levelled an excoriating critique against Heart of Darkness for the way it dehumanized African people. Achebe’s critique opened the doors for further postcolonial analyses of the work, was followed by those from other academic perspectives: feminist readings, for example, revealed a similar kind of effacement done unto its female subjects. Although Heart of Darkness has remained on many syllabi since the 1970s, it now occupies a much more controversial position in the Western canon: as a story that, while levelling critiques against colonialism that were novel for its time, and which was formative for the emergence of modernism in literature, is still deeply and inexcusably entrenched in the white male perspective.

On the most superficial level, Heart of Darkness can be understood through its semiautobiographical relationship to Conrad’s real life. Much like his protagonist Marlow, Conrad’s career as a merchant marine also took him up the Congo River. And much like Marlow, Conrad was profoundly affected by the human depravity he witnessed on his boat tour of European colonialism in Africa.

But it’s overly reductive to boil Heart of Darkness down to the commonalities it shares with Conrad’s own experiences. It would be useful to examine its elements crucial to the emergence of modernism: for example, Conrad’s use of multiple narrators; his couching of one narrative within another; the story’s achronological unfolding; and as would become increasingly clear as the 20th century progressed, his almost post-structuralist distrust in the stability of language. At the same time, his story pays homage to the Victorian tales he grew up on, evident in the popular heroism so central to his story’s narrative. In that sense, Heart of Darkness straddles the boundary between a waning Victorian sensibility and a waxing Modernist one.

One of the most resoundingly Modernist elements of Conrad’s work lies in this kind of early post-structuralist treatment of language—his insistence on the inherent inability of words to express the real, in all of its horrific truth. Marlow’s journey is full of encounters with things that are “unspeakable,” with words that are uninterpretable, and with a world that is eminently “inscrutable.” In this way, language fails time and time again to do what it is meant to do—to communicate. It’s a phenomenon best summed up when Marlow tells his audience that “it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence—that which makes its truth, its meaning—its subtle and penetrating essence… We live, as we dream—alone.” Kurtz—as “eloquent” as he may be—can’t even adequately communicate the terrifying darkness he observed around him.“The horror! The horror!” is all he can say. Some critics have surmised that part of Heart of Darkness ’s mass appeal comes from this ambiguity of language—from the free rein it gives its readers to interpret. Others posit this as a great weakness of the text, viewing Conrad’s inability to name things as an unseemly quality in a writer who’s supposed to be one of the greats. Perhaps this is itself a testament to the Heart of Darkness ’s breadth of interpretability.

Examining Heart of Darkness from a postcolonial perspective has given way to more derisive critiques. As Achebe put it, Conrad was a “thoroughgoing racist,” one who dehumanized Africans in order to use them as a backdrop against which to explore the white man’s interiority. Achebe is right: although Conrad rebukes the evils of colonialism, he does little to dismantle the racism that undergirds such a system, instead positing the indigenous people of Africa as little more than part of the natural environment . This work has been held up as one of the West’s most insightful books on the evils of European imperialism in Africa, and yet it fails to assign any particularity to African people themselves.

Feminist discourse has offered similar critiques, that Conrad has flattened his female characters similar to the way he’s done so with his African ones. Women are deployed not as multidimensional beings, but as signifiers undistinguished from the field of other signifiers that make up the text. They are shells emptied of all particularity and meaning, such that Conrad can fill them with the significance he sees fit: the African queen becomes the embodiment of darkened nature and an eroticized symbol of its atavistic allure; Kurtz’s Intended, meanwhile, is just a signifier for the illusory reality of society that Marlow is trying to protect against the invading darkness of human nature . Neither woman is interiorized, and neither is named—a rhetorical strategy that seems less about Conrad illustrating the failures of language than it does about him privileging his masculine voice above any possible feminine ones.

Much contemporary analysis—the aforementioned postcolonial and feminist critiques included—is centred not on text itself, but on other commentaries of the text, thereby elucidating the way that discussions in academia might unwittingly perpetuate some of the work’s more problematic elements. Thus, Heart of Darkness is occupying an ever-changing position in the literary canon: no longer as an elucidatory text that reveals the depths of human depravity, but as an artifact that is the product of such depravity and which reproduces it in its own right. The question then becomes: Does the Heart of Darkness still belong in the West’s literary canon? And if so, will it always?

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Themes in Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Introduction

Heart of darkness short summary, themes in heart of darkness, works cited, video voice-over.

Joseph Conrad, one of the most celebrated novelists of English literature, treats the concept of darkness from the core of his heart in his novel Heart of Darkness . The journey of the protagonist through the heart of Africa, which is the main motif of the novel, suggests how significant the theme of darkness is. This journey through the darkest parts of the world implies the man’s inner journey through the murkiness of his own being. This essay focuses on the themes in Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. The major novella’s themes are colonization, imperialism, darkness, racism, and evil. First, we will look at the short summary of the story, and then we will explore the key themes in Heart of Darkness.

Heart of Darkness tells the story of Charles Marlow, a sailor who is assigned to travel up the Congo River. He needs to find an enigmatic trader named Kurtz. Marlow’s journey takes him into the heart of the African continent, where he witnesses the brutality and savagery of European colonization and the corrupting influence of power and greed. Along the way, Marlow encounters a variety of characters.

In the novel, the narrator deals with several surreal versions of mystery and adventure, which otherwise could be perceived as an excursion into a hidden agenda. In fact, the discovery of new lands, which is a central theme of the novel, suggests a human being’s emblematic expedition into his own inner being where he finds his basic traits. The author carves a narrative structure which originates from a gut feeling that represents the main theme of the novel, and, through the paradoxical concepts of darkness and light, Conrad develops his major theme (that darkness exists at the core of a purified human soul?). That is to say, through an ironical juxtaposition of dark and light right from the beginning of the narrative, the author presents how darkness affects a human soul.

Thus, one finds that the world of the Whites also incorporates elements of uncivilized people, or it is part of what one would refer to as darkness . Ted Billy comments, “Conrad’s complex strategy with regard to racial implications is apparent in his opening pages, when he inverts the traditional dichotomy of black and white, light and darkness. London is the capital of the civilized world, but to Marlowe it was a place of darkness only ‘yesterday’.

Ivory is white, but it provides the incentive for white agents such as whites to become barbaric. The cannibals are blacks, yet they evidence greater restraint and composure than the trigger-happy white ‘pilgrims’ who accompany Marlowe to Kurtz’s Inner Station.” (Orr, Billy and Billy 68). In other words, the meaning of darkness achieves complete sense through the working of light; while on the other hand, brightness gets dimmed in the intensity of darkness. Therefore, it is explicit that Conrad’s narrative strategy in his novel was to present the theme of darkness through the meaning and interpretation of the concept of enlightenment, and to state that such enlightenment will come only through the recognition of the dark.

An understanding of the use of images in the novel best illustrates the author’s narrative strategy in presenting his major theme. Several critics have praised Conrad’s reminiscent power in the novel Heart of Darkness and his apt use of imagery suggests this. The deployment of visual imagery in the novel depends mainly upon the contrasting patterns of light and dark, and these images present the theme of darkness in the novel. It is important to comprehend that “to demonstrate the moral uncertainty of this world and of life in general, Conrad consistently alters common symbolic conceptions of light and dark.

Thus, white is not synonymous with good, nor black with evil, but rather both symbols are interchangeable.” (Conrad). Thus, the novelist alternately presents white and black characters as examples of severe suffering, civilized dignity, moral refinement, or violent savagery throughout his work. This promulgates the idea that there is no race, which is entirely good or evil, and every type of human being is a confusing mixture of inclinations for all kinds of behavior.

In other words, it becomes apparent that Conrad develops the concept of darkness with the use of imagery and the symbolic representation of the expedition by the protagonist through the inner parts of the Dark Continent. The significance of the novel and its theme resides in their explanation that there is darkness concealed deep within every person, which is apparent only by an understanding of the paradoxical themes of darkness and enlightenment.

One finds the profound significance that the narrator attaches to the theme of darkness right from the beginning of the novel where Marlow makes a voyage to Africa, the Dark Continent. Conrad cleverly entwines darkness into the fabric of his narration right from the early stages of the novel and compels his audience to recognize its true nature, thereby forcing them to acknowledge that darkness exists even in the most civilized minds, not to speak of the lands such humans inhabit. Marlow, representing the educated people of the land, understands that there is murkiness in their own land. Marlow embodies darkness not as if it is a strange element to him but as if he had been living in its dungeons all the while.

“The sun set; the dusk fell on the stream, and lights began to appear along the shore. The Chapman lighthouse, a three–legged thing erect on a mud flat, shone strongly. Lights of ships moved in the fairway—a great stir of lights going up and going down. And farther west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars. “And this also,” said Marlow suddenly, “has been one of the dark places of the earth.” (Conrad, Matin and Stade 47-48).

Darkness, the central theme of the novel, has been skillfully presented by the novelist in an effective narrative strategy which makes use of the paradoxical idea of the enlightenment. Therefore, it is obvious that the author adopted a narrative strategy which would make out his original objective in the most convincing manner. This intention of the author in Heart of Darkness is clear from the fact that he focused not to present some negative aspects of life or some gloomy sides of one’s existence as the concept darkness would mean to the traditional reader. On the contrary, he wanted the theme of darkness to be approached differently incorporating the idea of light in the interpretation of the theme.

This narrative strategy is evidently beyond the ordinary and the author perceived the novel as a means to convey his awareness of the concept of darkness which means not just the negatives, but positives as well. The narrative strategy of the author to find the meaning of darkness with the use of the opposing concept of light is evident from Conrad’s clarifying letter to the publisher William Blackwood. “The title I am thinking is ‘Heart of Darkness’ – but the narrative is not gloomy. The criminality of inefficiency and pure selfishness when tackling the civilizing work in Africa is a justifiable idea.” (Stephen Regan, Karl & Davies. As Reproduced in the Nineteenth-century Novel: A Critical Reader. Open University. London: Routledge. 2001. Vol.2. P.139-140.)

To conclude, the novel, Heart of Darkness, postulates the theme of darkness in a subtle manner to define the meaning of illumination through its contrastive term of light and enlightenment. The novel is remarkable in its use of different literary devices such as imagery, symbolism, characterization, and narrative strategy to convey the real meaning of the theme of darkness.

Orr, Leonard., Billy, Ted and Billy, Theodore. “Heart of Darkness (1899)” in A Joseph Conrad Companion. Westport: Greenwood, 1999.

Conrad, Joseph. Short Story Criticism: Heart of Darkness. Enotes. 2008. Web.

Conrad, Joseph., Matin, A. Michael and Stade, George. Heart of Darkness and Selected Short Fiction. Spark Educational, 2003.

Stephen Regan, Karl & Davies. As Reproduced in the Nineteenth-century Novel: A Critical Reader. Open University. London: Routledge. 2001. Vol.2. P.139-140.

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Criminality of inefficiency and pure selfishness:, the historical theme:, works cited.

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Heart of Darkness

Heart of darkness and "hollow men" danielle robinson.

Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad, and "Hollow Men," by T.S. Eliot have several comparative themes, though each author has an entirely separate way of conveying them. Each work displays a darkened and dismal mood, separation, and obscurity, which are depicted through different characters and environments. The authors both have a disdain for the hierarchy in society, which they cannot escape, and the destructive consequences that occur because of a higher authority's demands. And, both authors portray characters who are observant, though one observes the tactile, and the other looks deeper into the spirituality of himself and others.

Conrad and Eliot make darkness, death, impending doom, and separation the main focus in these two pieces of work. On page one of Heart of Darkness, Conrad uses descriptions like "haze, dark, mournful, brooding, and gloom" to set the general scene and mood for the continuum of the novel. Eliot sets up a similar scene by using "death" several times throughout the poem (line 14), and parallels life with "fading" or "dying stars" (line 28, 44, and 54). In lines 39-44 Eliot even goes so far as to give a morbid depiction of a graveyard,

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