Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness is an 1899 novella by Joseph Conrad, initially published as a three-part piece in Blackwood's Magazine, that tells the story of Charles Marlow, a steamer captain tasked with recovering an ivory trader who has lost touch with his Belgian trading company. Throughout Marlow's voyage up the Congo River, he is exposed to and recounts different horrors and hypocrisies of European Imperialism.

Conrad served as a maritime marine in 1890 in the Congo Free State, and his time there is often credited with inspiring Heart of Darkness. Consequently, Conrad delivers an almost firsthand account of a hypothetical [European male] experiencing colonialism in the late 1800s. However, until the civil rights movement of the 1960s, it was seen as a minor piece of work, even by Conrad. It is now considered one of the earliest written anti-imperial texts to gain major popularity. One of the central themes of the story is that civilized society is not so civilized; it merely exports its savagery to other parts of the world.

Note: Heart of Darkness is considered an anti-colonial work, but it requires a bit of historic context to benefit from. While Conrad certainly had anti-colonial opinions to share with the world, he was still no doubt a bystander and a major beneficiary of colonialism. He was also not a victim of colonialism but a part of the perpetrating society of it, and subsequently, some of his critiques fall very short of what we would consider liberal and humane today.

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