Heart of Darkness
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Heart of Darkness is a novella by Joseph Conrad. Before its 1902 publication, it appeared as a three-part series (1899) in Blackwood's Magazine. It is widely regarded as a significant work of English literature and part of the Western canon.
This highly symbolic story is actually a story within a story, or frame narrative. It follows Charles Marlow as he recounts, at dusk and into the evening, his adventure into the Congo to a group of men aboard a ship anchored in the Thames Estuary.
The story details an incident when Marlow, an Englishman, took a foreign assignment as a ferry-boat captain, employed by a Belgian trading company, on what readers may assume is the Congo River, in the Congo Free State, a private colony of King Leopold II; the country is never specifically named. Though his job is transporting ivory downriver, Marlow quickly develops an intense interest in investigating Kurtz, an ivory-procurement agent in the employ of the government. Kurtz has a reputation throughout the region.
