Heart of Darkness
Summary of the Novel back taken from: www.sparknotes.com Heart of Darkness begins on the deck of the Nellie, a British ship anchored on the coast of the Thames. The anonymous narrator, the Director of Companies, the Accountant, and Marlow sit in silence. Marlow begins telling the three men about a time he journeyed in a steamboat up the Congo River. For the rest of the novel (with only minor interruptions), Marlow narrates his tale. As a young man, Marlow desires to visit Africa and pilot a steamboat on the Congo River. After learning of the Company�a large ivory-trading firm working out of the Congo�Marlow applies for and received a post. He left Europe in a French steamer. At the Company's Outer Station in the Congo, Marlow witnesses scenes of brutality, chaos, and waste. Marlow speaks with an Accountant, whose spotless dress and uptight demeanor fascinate him. Marlow first learns from the Accountant of Kurtz�a �remarkable� agent working in the interior. Marlow leaves the Outer Station on a 200-mile trek across Africa, and eventually reaches the Company's Central Station, where he learns that the steamboat he is supposed to pilot up the Congo was wrecked at the bottom of the river. Frustrated, Marlow learns that he has to wait at the Central Station until his boat is repaired. Marlow then meets the Company's Manager, who told him more about Kurtz. According to the Manager, Kurtz is supposedly ill, and the Manager feigns great concern over Kurtz's health�although Marlow later suspects that the Manager wrecked his steamboat on purpose to keep supplies from getting to Kurtz. Marlow also meets the Brickmaker, a man whose position seems unnecessary, because he doesn't have all the materials for making bricks. After three weeks, a band of traders called The Eldorado Exploring Expedition�led by the Manager's uncle�arrives. One night, as Marlow is lying on the deck of his salvaged steamboat, he overhears the Manager and his uncle talk about Kurtz. Marlow concludes that the Manager fears that Kurtz is trying to steal his job. His uncle, however, told him to have faith in the power of the jungle to �do away� with Kurtz. Marlow's boat is finally repaired, and he leaves the Central Station (accompanied by the Manager, some agents, and a crew of cannibals) to bring relief to Kurtz. Approximately fifty miles below Kurtz's Inner Station, they find a hut of reeds, a woodpile and an English book titled An Inquiry into some Points of Seamanship. As it crept toward Kurtz, Marlow's steamboat is attacked by a shower of arrows. The Whites fire rifles into the jungle while Marlow tries to navigate the boat. A native helmsman is killed by a large spear and thrown overboard. Assuming that the same natives who are attacking them have already attacked the Inner Station, Marlow feels disappointed now that he will never get the chance to speak to Kurtz. Marlow reaches the Inner Station and notices Kurtz's building through his telescope�there is no fence, but a series of posts ornamented with �balls� that Marlow later learns were natives' heads. A Russian trader and disciple of Kurtz, called �The Harlequin� by Marlow, approaches the steamboat and tells Marlow that Kurtz is still alive. Marlow learns that the hut they previously saw is the Harlequin's. The Harlequin speaks enthusiastically of Kurtz's wisdom, saying, �This man has enlarged my mind.� Marlow learns from him that the steamboat was attacked because the natives did not want Kurtz to be taken away. Suddenly, Marlow sees a group of native men coming toward him, carrying Kurtz on a stretcher; Kurtz is taken inside a hut, where Marlow approaches him and gives him some letters. Marlow notices that Kurtz is frail, sick, and bald. After leaving the hut, Marlow sees a �wild and gorgeous� native woman approach the steamer; the Harlequin hints to Marlow that the woman is Kurtz's mistress. Marlow then hears Kurtz chiding the Manager from behind a curtain: �Save me!�save the ivory, you mean.� The Harlequin, fearing what might happen when Kurtz is taken on board the steamboat, asks Marlow for some tobacco and rifle cartridges; he then leaves in a canoe. At midnight that same night, Marlow awakens to the sound of a big drum. He inspects Kurtz's cabin, only to discover that he is not there. Marlow runs outside and finds a trail running through the grass�and realizes that Kurtz is escaping by crawling away on all fours. When he comes upon Kurtz, Kurtz warns him to run, but Marlow helped Kurtz to his feet and carried him back to the cabin. The next day, Marlow, his crew, and Kurtz leave the Inner Station. As they move farther away from the Inner Station, Kurtz's health deteriorates; at one point, the steamboat breaks down and Kurtz gives Marlow a packet of letters and a photograph for safe-keeping, fearing that the Manager will take them. Marlow complies. One night after the breakdown, Marlow approaches Kurtz, who is lying in the pilothouse on his stretcher �waiting for death.� After trying to reassure Kurtz that he is not going to die, Marlow hears Kurtz whisper his final words: �The horror! The horror!� The next day, Kurtz is buried offshore in a muddy hole. After returning to Europe, Marlow again visits Brussels and finds himself unable to relate to the sheltered Europeans around him. A Company official approaches Marlow and asks for the packet of papers to which Kurtz had entrusted him. Marlow refuses, but he does give the official a copy of Kurtz's report to The Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs with Kurtz's chilling postscript (�Exterminate all the brutes!�) torn off. He learns that Kurtz's mother had died after being nursed by Kurtz's �Intended,� or fiancée. Marlow's final duty to Kurtz is to visit his Intended and deliver Kurtz's letters (and her portrait) to her. When he meets her, at her house, she is dressed in mourning and still greatly upset by Kurtz's death. Marlow lets slip that he was with Kurtz when he died, and the Intended asks him to repeat Kurtz's last words Marlow lies to her and says, �The last word he pronounced was�your name.� The Intended states that she �knew� Kurtz would have said such a thing, and Marlow leaves, disgusted by his lie yet unable to prevent himself from telling it. The anonymous narrator on board the Nellie then resumes his narrative. The Director of Companies makes an innocuous remark about the tide, and the narrator looks out at the overcast sky and the Thames�which seems to him to lead �into the heart of an immense darkness.�
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Author Biography back taken from: www.sparknotes.com Heart of Darkness � Personal Background Joseph Conrad, one of the English language's greatest stylists, was born Teodor Josef Konrad Nalecz Korzenikowski in Podolia, a province of the Polish Ukraine. Poland had been a Roman Catholic kingdom since 1024, but was invaded, partitioned, and repartitioned throughout the late eighteenth-century by Russia, Prussia, and Austria. At the time of Conrad's birth (December 3, 1857), Poland was one-third of its size before being divided between the three great powers; despite the efforts of nationalists such as Tadeusz Kosciuszko, who led an unsuccessful uprising in 1795, Poland was controlled by other nations and struggled for independence. When Conrad was born, Russia effectively controlled Poland. Conrad's childhood was largely affected by his homeland's struggle for independence. His father, Apollo Korzeniowski, belonged to the szlachta, a hereditary social class comprised of members of the landed gentry; he despised the Russian oppression of his native land. At the time of Conrad's birth, Apollo's land had been seized by the Russian government because of his participation in past uprisings. He and one of Conrad's maternal uncles, Stefan Bobrowski, helped plan an uprising against Russian rule in 1863. Other members of Conrad's family showed similar patriotic convictions: Kazimirez Bobrowski, another maternal uncle, resigned his commission in the army (controlled by Russia) and was imprisoned, while Robert and Hilary Korzeniowski, two fraternal uncles, also assisted in planning the aforementioned rebellion. (Robert died in 1863 and Hilary was imprisoned and exiled.) All of this political turmoil would prove to be predictably disturbing to young Josef, who could only stand idly by as he watched his family embroiled in such dangerous controversy. The notion of the strong oppressing the weak�and the weak powerless to revolt�surfaces in Heart of Darkness, where the White traders wantonly murder the Congolese in pursuit of riches and power. Conrad's father was also a writer and translator, who composed political tracts, poetry, and satirical plays. His public urgings for Polish freedom, however, eventually caused Russian authorities to arrest and imprison him in 1861; in 1862, his wife (Conrad's mother), Eva, was also arrested and charged with assisting her husband in his anti-Russian activities. The two were sentenced to exile in Vologda, a town in northern Russia. Their exile was a hard and bitter one: Eva died of tuberculosis in 1865 and Apollo died of the same disease in 1869. Conrad, now only twelve years old, was naturally devastated; his own physical health deteriorated and he suffered from a number of lung inflammations and epileptic seizures. His poor health would become a recurring problem throughout the remainder of his life. Poland did not gain independence until 1919, and although patriots such as Apollo were instrumental in this eventual success, their martyrdom left many children (such as Conrad) without parents or hope for their future. Call of the Sea back After his father's death, Conrad was returned to Krakow, Poland, where he became a ward of his maternal uncle, Thaddeus Bobrowski. His uncle sent Conrad to school in Krakow and then to Geneva under the guidance of a private tutor. However, Conrad was a poor student; Despite his having studied Greek, Latin, mathematics, and (of course) geography, he never completed the formal courses of study that he was expected to finish. His apathy toward formal education was counterbalanced by the reading he did on his own: During his early teenage years, Conrad read a great deal, particularly translations Charles Dickens' novels and Captain Frederick Marryat, an English novelist who wrote popular adventure yarns about life at sea. (He also read widely in French.) Marryat's novels may have been partly responsible for the sixteen-year-old Conrad's desire to go to sea and travel the world as a merchant marine (an exotic wish for a boy who grew up in a land-locked country); in 1874, his uncle reluctantly granted him permission to leave Poland and travel, by train, to the French port city of Marseille to join the French Merchant Navy. After his arrival, Conrad made three voyages to the West Indies between 1875 and 1878; During this time, he smuggled guns for the Carlists, who were trying to put Carlos de Bourbon on the throne of Spain. In 1878, Conrad suffered from depression, caused in part by gambling debts and his being forbidden to work on any French ships due to his lying about having the proper permits. He made an unsuccessful attempt at suicide, shooting himself through the shoulder and missing his vital organs. (Biographers differ in their interpretations of this attempt: Some contend that Conrad was depressed about his squandering all his money, while others report that the attempt was a ruse designed to put Conrad out of work and thus escape the grasp of creditors.) Later that year, Conrad boarded an English ship that took him to the eastern port-town of Lowestoft; there, he joined the crew of a ship that made six voyages between Lowestoft and Newcastle. During this time, he learned English. Conrad's determination to succeed as a seaman was impressive: Although he began his career as a common sailor, by 1886 he had sailed to the Asia and was made master of his own ship. He then became a British subject and changed his name to Joseph Conrad (partly to avoid having to return to Poland and serve in the Russian military). In 1888, Conrad received his first command of the Otago, a ship harboring in Bangkok whose master had died. Surprisingly, Conrad hated the day-to-day life of a sailor and never owned a boat after becoming famous; The sea, however, offered Conrad the opportunity to make a living. One of Conrad's most important voyages occurred in 1890, when he sailed a steamboat up the Congo River in central Africa. Conrad was attracted to this region partly because of the adventure he thought it could offer him and (perhaps more importantly) because working in the Congo could earn him some much-needed money. During this voyage, Conrad witnessed incredible barbarity, illness, and inhumanity; his recollections of this trip would eventually become the basis of his most famous work, Heart of Darkness. During this time, Conrad was considering turning his seafaring adventures into novels, and he eventually published Almayer's Folly, which he had been composing during the early 1890s in 1895. The success of his first novel lured him away from the sea to his new adventures as an English novelist. He settled in England, married Jessie George (in 1896), and began the career for which the world would remember him best. From Sailor to Author back After the publication of Almayer's Folly, Conrad began producing a number of books in rapid succession, many of which featured plots about sailors and travel to explore moral ambiguity and the nature of human identity. The Nigger of the �Narcissus� (1897) concerns a tubercular Black sailor whose impending death affects his fellow crewmen in a number of profound ways. Lord Jim (1900) examines the effects of a cowardly act and how this act's moral repercussions haunt a man until his death. (Lord Jim's story is told by Marlow, the narrator of Heart of Darkness.) In 1902, Conrad published Heart of Darkness, a short novel detailing Marlow's journey into the Belgian Congo�and the metaphorical �heart of darkness� of man. All three books were highly regarded in their time and are still widely read and studied today. In 1904, Nostromo was published; the complex tale of an imaginary South American republic. The effects of greed and foreign exploitation helped to define Conrad's oblique and sometimes difficult narrative style. Although he produced a large body of work, Conrad was often a slow writer who felt the pressure of deadlines and the need to keep writing to keep his family financially solvent. His struggles were eased, however, in 1910, when John Quinn, an American lawyer, bought all of Conrad's manuscripts and awarded him a small pension. Conrad continued writing tales of travel, but also turned his attention to novels of political intrigue. The Secret Agent (1907) concerns a group of anarchists who plan to blow up the Greenwich Observatory; Under Western Eyes (1911), set in nineteenth-century Czarist Russia, follows the life of a student who betrays his friend�the assassin of a government official�to the authorities. His story �The Secret Sharer� (1912) uses the �Doppelganger theme� (where a man meets his figurative double) to examine what Conrad viewed as the shifting nature of human identity and the essential isolation of all human beings. In 1913, Chance was a great success both critically and financially; the novel, like Heart of Darkness, explores the ways in which an innocent person (like Marlow) becomes hardened by the horrors that surround her. Other novels marked by these essential Conradian themes include The Inheritors (cowritten with Ford Maddox Ford, 1901), Victory (1915), and The Shadow-Line (1917). Conrad also turned to autobiography: The Mirror of the Sea (1906), A Personal Record (1912), and Notes on Life and Letters (1921). All treat his seafaring days and development as an artist. Conrad died of heart failure on August 3, 1924. He was buried in Canterbury Cemetery and survived by his wife and sons (Borys and John). Still honored by millions of readers as one of the greatest modern writers, Conrad left behind a large body of work whose nature he defined (in his Preface to The Nigger of the �Narcissus�) as �a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect.� About the Novel � Introduction back Heart of Darkness originally appeared serially in Blackwood's Magazine in 1899. It was eventually published as a whole in 1902, as the third work in a volume Conrad titled Youth. Since its publication in Youth, the novel has fascinated numerous readers and critics, almost all of whom regarded the novel as an important one because of the ways it uses ambiguity and (in Conrad's own words), �foggishness� to dramatize Marlow's perceptions of the horrors he encounters. Critics have regarded Heart of Darkness as a work that in several important ways broke many narrative conventions and brought the English novel into the twentieth century. Notable exceptions who didn't receive the novel well were the British novelist E. M. Forster, who disparaged the very ambiguities that other critics found so interesting, and the African novelist Chinua Achebe, who derided the novel and Conrad as examples of European racism. Conrad voyaged to the Congo in 1890, when he sailed a steamboat up the Congo River just as Marlow does in the novel. As Conrad writes of the novel in his 1917 Introduction, �Heart of Darkness . . . is experience pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case.� Numerous biographical facts find their way into the novel. For example, like Marlow, Conrad had always longed to �follow the sea,� the wife of a distant relative (like Marlow's aunt) helped him secure a job with a trading company, the captain who preceded him had been killed by natives in a quarrel (like Fresleven in the novel), and Conrad encountered several men who showed barbaric tendencies similar to the ones exhibited by Kurtz. What makes Heart of Darkness more than an interesting travelogue and shocking account of horrors is the way that it details�in subtle ways�Marlow's gradual understanding of what is happening in this far-off region of the world. Like many Europeans�including his creator�Marlow longed for adventure and devoured accounts such as those offered by Stanley. But once he arrives in the Congo and sees the terrible �work� (as he ironically calls it) taking place, he can no longer hide under the cover of his comfortable civilization. Instead, all the horrors perpetrated by European traders and agents�typified by Kurtz�force him to look into his own soul and find what darkness lies there. In the first half of the novel, Marlow states, �The essentials of this affair lay deep under the surface, beyond my reach��but by the end of his journey, he will have peeked beneath �the surface� and discovered the inhumanity of which even men such as the once-upstanding Kurtz are capable. The end of the nineteenth-century brought about one of the most notable examples of imperialism and genocide in modern memory. King Leopold II of Belgium (ruled 1865�1909) possessed an insatiable greed for money, land, and power�and looked to Africa to find them. Like many other Europeans, he was intrigued by reports of Africa made by the famed explorer Henry Morton Stanley (1841�1904), whose books How I Found Livingstone: Adventures and Discoveries in Central Africa (1872) and Through the Dark Continent (1878) were best-selling accounts of his travels. Through a series of machinations and a deluge of propaganda proclaiming his munificence, Leopold eventually secured the Congo region of Africa as a Belgian colony. On May 20, 1885, Leopold named his new nation the État Independent du Congo, or The Congo Free State. This huge area of Africa remained under Belgium control until 1960. The Congo was a perfect colony for Leopold II for several reasons. First, ivory and rubber were plentiful and could be systematically gathered and shipped to Europe. Second, the only law there was Leopold's: Although he constantly presented himself to his European contemporaries as a philanthropist and humanitarian, Leopold ran the Congo (without ever visiting it) from a distance with an iron hand. Third, labor was plentiful and, more important to Leopold, free, because his agents routinely forced the Congolese into slave labor by means of torture or intimidation: Women, for example, were often kidnapped and held until their husbands and sons gathered sufficient quantities of rubber. Forth, there were few operating expenses: Huts and mess-halls were constructed for the agents, and the construction of a railroad system running through the Congo guaranteed that supplies could reach different stations quickly. Finally, the colony was thousands of miles away from sheltered European skies. People could not condemn what they could not see. Leopold's agents, therefore, comprised a chaotic, unforgiving, and hateful force determined only to make the most money possible by exploiting the natives�often whipping them with a piece of sun-dried hippopotamus hide called a chicotte, chopping off their hands and heads, or killing them by dozens at a time. In his recent study of the Congo, King Leopold's Ghost, the historian Adam Hochschild estimates that during the period of Leopold's pillage of the Congo, the population dropped by ten million people. Disease, starvation, a low birth rate, and outright murder all combined to turn the Congo into what Heart of Darkness later portrayed as a �nightmare.� Some observers of the atrocities committed there�such as E. D. Morel and Sir Roger Casement�became noted anti-Leopold activists and launched semi-successful campaigns to end Leopold's rule. Other observers transformed what they saw into art�as did Joseph Conrad when he wrote Heart of Darkness. Leopold's Congo and the people�White and Black�who populated it find their way into the pages of Conrad's novel. The ominous Company that hires Marlow, for example, is a thinly veiled depiction of Leopold's operations in Africa. Leopold's agents become the �faithless pilgrims� looking for riches that Marlow describes once he reaches the Congo, and the chain gang Marlow sees at the Outer Station is a glimpse at the slavery enforced by Leopold's agents. Kurtz, the �first class agent� who commits numerous acts of savagery (including the placing of �rebel� heads upon posts surrounding his hut) is an embodiment of the collective horrors that Conrad witnessed firsthand. As Marlow tells his audience on board the Nellie, �In the blinding sunshine of that land I would become acquainted with a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly.� The �devil� in this context is the greed that motivated Leopold to continue the systematic ravaging of the Congo and its people for more than twenty years.
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Exam Questions back January 2005 (a) Remind yourself of the passage in Chapter 2 from '"Try to be civil, Marlow,' growled a voice..."' (Wordsworth edition page 62) to "...It was an extravagant mystery." and discuss the significance of this passage in relation to your reading of the novel as a whole. In the course of your answer:
(b) Considering in detail one or two passages, discuss ways in which Conrad presents views of Kurtz before Marlow meets him. In the course of your answer:
June 2005 (a) Remind yourself of the passage in Chapter 3 from "'I thought his memory was life the other memories of the dead...'" (Wordsworth edition page 101) to the end of the chapter. How far do you find this an effective ending to the novel? In the course of your answer:
(b) Considering in detail one or two passages, discuss Conrad's presentation of the river as a setting for the novel's events. In the course of your answer:
January 2006 (a) Remind yourself of the passage in Chapter 3 from "'We broke down - as I had expected - and had to lie up for repairs...'" (Wordsworth edition page 97) to "...a soul as translucently pure as a cliff of crystal.'" (page 99) Discuss the significance of this passage in your reading of the novel. In the course of your answer:
(b) Considering in detail one or two passages discuss the appropriateness of the novel's title. In the course of your answer:
June 2006 (a) Remind yourself of the passage in Chapter 1 from "' A slight clinking behind me made me turn my head...'" (Wordsworth edition page 43) to "'...and in return came a precious trickel of ivory.'" (page 46) Discuss the significance of this passage in your reading of the novel. In the course of your answer:
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