Title: Heart of Darkness
Author: Joseph Conrad
Context: Heart of Darkness (1899) is a post colonial novel by Joseph Conrad. In the year 1899 it was primarily a three-part series in Blackwood’s Magazine. The novel is a story within a story.
Synopsis: Heart of Darkness follows Charlie Marlow a former ferry boat captain, who is onboard an anchored ship afloat on the River Thames. Charlie Marlow a former captain of a ferry boat talks and shares about his adventures to the seafarer men in a group. He shares his experiences in earlier life as captain of a ferry boat on the Congo River in Africa. Transporting ivory downriver was the main job of Charlie, however he begins taking interest in a government employed agent named Kurtz, in charge of procuring ivory.
Kurtz has earned reputation as an intelligent emissary of progress and set himself so well that the natives in one of the darkest places on earth start considering him as god. Charlie Marlow develops suspicion that Kurtz has turned mad and there is something amiss. The novel reflects upon the journey into a corrupted person’s nightmare psyche, examines the horror of Western colonialism and on corruptive colonialism in Europe. It is considered to be one of the most influential works ever to be written. Not only is this phenomenon depicted as one that tarnishes the people and lands it exploits but even those who advance it in the Western regions.
English literature has extensively examined the work of Joseph Conrad although it garnered a lackluster reception, initially.
Other works by the Author:
Novels
1895 – Almayer’s Folly
1896 – An Outcast of the Islands
1897 – The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’
1900 – Lord Jim
1901 – The Inheritors
1902 – Typhoon
1902 – The End of the Tether
1903 – Romance
1904 – Nostromo
1907 – The Secret Agent
1911 – Under Western Eyes
1913 – Chance
1915 – Victory
1917 – The Shadow Line
1919 – The Arrow of Gold
1920 – The Rescue
1923 – The Nature of a Crime
1923 – The Rover
1925 – Suspense: A Napoleonic Novel