Kurtz, a man shrouded in mystery but known by all for both being the manager of the top-earning post and for his controversial business practices. As he visits the various trading posts and their leaders, he is forced to witness and try not to succumb to the savage environment, the brutal enslavement of the Africans at the hands of the settlers, and the human heart at its absolute darkest. The objective, as laid out by his employer, is to pick up and return with the ivory harvests collected by each trading outpost along the way. It all started when he was just starting out as a seaman.Ĭharles Marlow is a seaman just hired as a ferry captain for a Belgian trading company in the Congo, after the last one was killed by the natives over a petty dispute. He goes on to explain how he got to know this darkness and its effect on people so incredibly well. how the island of Great Britain was once savage, untamed, and incredibly inhospitable to outsiders. As they fill the time with pleasant conversation, one of them suddenly speaks of how the very river they are on was once 'one of the dark places of the earth,' i.e. The book starts in the 19th century with five close friends on a boat in the Thames river just outside London, waiting for the tide to go out.

Heart of Darkness is a novella by Joseph Conrad, originally published as a three-part series in Blackwood's Magazine in 1899.

I listened, I listened on the watch for the sentence, for the word, that would give me the clew to the faint uneasiness inspired by this narrative that seemed to shape itself without human lips in the heavy night-air of the river. The others might have been asleep, but I was awake. For a long time already he, sitting apart, had been no more to us than a voice. It had become so pitch dark that we listeners could hardly see one another.

Heart of darkness book