Introduction

Joseph Conrad the writer of “Heart of Darkness” novella was a Polish author, who is considered

to be one of the best English-writing authors. Conrad’s writings are remarkable, especially when

you realize that English was his second language.

During this English Course (English 385) we were introduced to another remarkable novella by

Joseph Conrad “The Secret Sharer”, which was a prime example of metaphors and reading

between the lines.

Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” is a story about an ivory transporter in Africa called

Marlow, who travels up the Congo river to meet a man named Kurtz, who has ascended to be a

god-like figure among the natives, and is known as a man of countless capabilities.

On his way, he sees how the lives of the natives have transformed under the hand of the

European colonialism and imperialism.

This is a dark introspective story of greed, darkness, and exploitation.

Plot Summary

The book starts that Marlow becomes a riverboat captain at Belgian trade company in the Congo.

Marlow becomes the readers eyes and ears in observing the ruthless and cruel circumstances in

Africa as the natives of the area are enslaved and work the Belgian trade company, regardless of

the abuse, mistreatment and bad working conditions.

It all starts as Marlow sets foot at the Central station after his steamship has been sunk. So, he

must wait there for the ship to be repaired.

During this time, he learns more about a legendary-like figure, Kurtz, that everyone fears and

talks about.

The administrator of Central Station appears to fear Kurtz as well since he sees him as a threat

that could jeopardize his position.

The rumors and whispers suggest that Kurtz is sick with an illness.

As the ship’s repairs are over, Marlow, the administrator, a crew of cannibals and a few other

agents start their voyage up the Congo river.

The voyage is long and far from easy. The thick jungle is far and wide, and so is the deep

silence, which makes everyone in anticipation to what happens next, they are at the edge of their

seats.

During in their journey, the crew of the ship comes across stacked firewood next to a native’s

hut. A note next to it saying that the wood is theirs.

They start loading the firewood into the steamboat, and not long after they finish loading, the

boat descends into a thick fog.

As the fog vanishes, they are attacked by natives hiding in the jungle, who fire at them with no

apparent reason.

Marlow successfully scared them off with the steamship whistle.

After some time, they arrive at the Inner Station, where Kurtz is.

Everyone imagines that he is already dead because of his illness, but they were assured that he is

all right. The Russian trader that meets them when they arrived and tells them that he is the one

that left the firewood for them.

Marlow understood that Kurtz is considered to be a god among the natives, and has used his

stature to raid the area for ivory, from what the Russian has been saying and behaving around

Kurtz

Somewhere around the station, there is a scary grisly fence made of spired severed heads, which

is uses to frighten away anyone who wants to disobey and rebel against Kurtz.

The men took Kurtz out of his room on a stretcher and into the ship.

The natives come out of the jungle, and surrounds Kurtz, as he talked to them, he was brought

aboard the steamship, he is very sick.

In the meantime, Marlow sees a gorgeous woman walking down the riverbank, and she was

constantly gazing at the direction of the steamship.

The Russian speaks about her, revealing that she is Kurtz’s mistress, and that she influenced his

way of thinking, instigating trouble for everyone.

In reality, Kurtz is the one who ordered the natives to attack the steamship, thinking that if they

get attacked, they will get discouraged, believing that he has already passed away. That way,

they might return where they came from, and he might be left to fulfill and complete all of his

plans.

Marlow swears that he will keep it a secret.

That night, Marlow notices that Kurtz disappears for a moment and goes out to search for him.

He finds Kurtz crawling in the direction of the native’s settlement.

Marlow tries to talk to him, and in the end, persuades him to go back to the steamship.
The next morning, the steamship proceed and depart down the Congo river. Meanwhile, Kurtz’s

health is getting from bad to worse.

Marlow is put in a situation where he is listening to Kurtz’s philosophies and is trusted with

some of Kurtz’s private documents.

Among these private documents is also a booklet or a brochure about exterminating “the brutes”

by civilizing the savages. On their journey, the steamship encounters a problem, and they have to

stop it in order to repair it.

However, it is too late, since Kurtz’s health is already getting worse and he dies, saying “The

horror! The horror!” as his last words to Marlow.

Marlow is now confused and disarrayed. He gets ill as will afterward but survives the illness.

After Marlow return to Europe, he visits Kurtz’s fiancé.

This scene is quite remarkable. Kurtz’s fiancé is still in mourning, and when she talks about

Kurtz, she elevates him as a model of achievement and human virtue and values.

Kurtz’s fiancé asks Marlow to tell her what Kurtz’s last words was.

Marlow considers telling her the truth, but he cannot bring himself to do so.

So, instead of shattering her illusions of the man she was supposed to marry and loves, he told

her that Kurtz uttered her name right before dying instead of “The horror! The horror!”.

Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness Similarities

“Apocalypse Now” is an epic war movie set during the Vietnam War by Francis Ford Coppola

based on Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”.

The movie follows U.S. Army special operations officer Captain Benjamin L. Willard as he

journeys through the war-torn Vietnam in 1967 on an assignment to kill a renegade U.S. Army

Special Forces Colonel named Walter E. Kurtz.

As Willard journeys up the Nung River in the hunt for Kurtz, Willard is constantly confronted

with the horrors and absurdities of war. Willard finally finds Colonel Kurtz, who has established

a command over a village of warriors. Willard ultimately carries out his mission, killing Colonel

Kurtz, whose last words echoed those of Kurtz in the Heart of Darkness novella 'The horror…

the horror.'

In both plot and themes, there are prominent similarities between Apocalypse Now and Heart of

Darkness. There are also some important differences.

Both stories deal with colonialism and imperialism. Both Apocalypse Now and Heart of

Darkness deal with the horrific dark side of imperialism and colonialism. In Heart of Darkness,

the Belgian company is the imperial colonialist power in Africa. In Apocalypse Now, it is the

U.S. military in Vietnam. In both cases, the imperial colonialist power is shown committing war

crimes and cruel atrocities against the native population. Both narratives also examine the de-

humanizing effect of colonialism on the colonizers. Kurtz is perhaps the epitome and symbol of

this de-humanization in both narratives.

Both stories talk about savagery vs civilization. Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness justify

the darker side of colonialism and imperialism, the Belgian company and it is imperial

colonialist power in Africa and the U.S. military in Vietnam in Apocalypse Now. In both

narratives we see that imperial colonialist power represent civility despite their crimes against

humanity and their display of power such as the “scary fence made of spired severed heads” in
the Heart of Darkness or destroying a town for surfing in Apocalypse Now. Meanwhile, the

natives that are trying to protect what they have from the imperial colonialist are called savages.

Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness, they both share a common theme, as they both

commentate on colonialism, imperialism, evil and truth. These themes are what make these

works so effective serving as a time capsule for each time period.

One of the main differences between Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness that we find is the

ending, Apocalypse Now story stops with the words 'The horror… the horror.' Meanwhile, Heart

of Darkness ends in back home in Europe in a sea of lies about the true nature of Kurtz.

The Analyses of The Leader or Leaders in Heart of Darkness

Although Kurtz does not make his short-lived entrance until late in the story, I still believe that

he is the clear leader and the antagonist of this story, his shadow haunts Marlow long before and

long after their short-lived encounter. Marlow first hears about Kurtz at the Outer Station, when

the accountant explains that Kurtz controls the most fruitful ivory station in the Congo. Marlow

learns more about Kurtz the throughout his journey. At the Central Station he sees a painting

Kurtz made of a blindfolded woman holding a torch in the darkness. Kurtz’s painting obviously

declares his approval and support to the European imperialism mission of civilizing Africa,

which seeks to bring European enlightenment to the dark wilderness of Africa, just as Marlow

believes that the Romans brought enlightenment to England.

Marlow also describes that Kurtz supports imperialism in a booklet he wrote. However, Kurtz’s

copy of the booklet has a handwritten phrase “Exterminate all the brutes!” The absolute violence

and viciousness of this phrase shows Kurtz’s fall into insanity and madness as well as the

radicalization of his imperialist point of view and philosophy.

Kurtz, as a representative of a Belgian colonial enterprise, he symbolizes an abstract picture of

an antagonist, representing European colonialism and imperialism. Marlow makes the

connection between Kurtz and Europe explicitly when he reveals Kurtz’s ancestry and education

“The original Kurtz had been educated partly in England, and—as he was good enough to say

himself—his sympathies were in the right place. His mother was half-English, his father was

half-French. All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz” Here, Marlow refers to more than

Kurtz’s family European bloodline. Marlow argues about the wider social, political, and cultural

norms shared throughout Europe, despite national differences. All these norms helped make

Kurtz the man he grows into in Africa.

Moreover, the deterioration of Kurtz’s mind also mirrors the failure of the reason behind

European imperialism. Kurtz set out with good intentions on behalf of “the Company” but ended

up consumed by becoming a god to the natives, violent desires and greed.

The logic of imperialism is overwhelmed by parallel paradoxes such as Kurtz’s.

In the name of civilizing the African savages, a European enterprise fueled by greed and

corruption; used savage violent means to extract resources from the so-called savages

At a conclusion, Kurtz fully symbolizes the moral hypocrisy and duplicity of Europe and its

colonialism and imperialism agendas. Yet he is still the leader and the antagonist despite his

short-lived appearance in this novella.

Reconstruction of Ambiguities and Metaphors

In the very first opening pages of “Heart of Darkness”, Marlow speaks about the symbol of

darkness "And this also," he says, speaking of England, "has been one of the dark places on

earth." He means that the land and its peoples were primitive and savages before the Roman
conquest, an equivalent to the European colonial control of Africa. Light and peace is here now,

Marlow implies, but "darkness was here yesterday."

Another interesting one, down the story "We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of

darkness" There is precise darkness in the jungle and the waters of the river. But he also says that

the misery of the natives and the evil in the hearts of “the Company” men are a metaphor of

darkness.

Maybe, the most important metaphoric darkness is that revealed in Kurtz's heart and symbolized

by the scary grisly fence made of spired severed heads. There, they are "black, dried, sunken,

with closed eyelids." These heads and the grisly fence stand as enduring symbols of Kurtz's

immorality and evil. Kurtz, then, symbolizes the darkness of the colonizers' (and Europe as

whole) lost morality, but there is also a sense in which Kurtz is the victim of the darkness of the

jungle. Marlow comments on "how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own" in

trying to justify Kurtz's descent into evil and immorality.

At the end of the novella, it is said in ambiguous and indirect way that the darkness is influenced

and controlled by the so called civilized white man. The heartless, deceptiveness and the selfish

Kurtz and Marlow are the main source of darkness in Africa.

Ivory, or the resource symbolizes the greed of the European imperialists. It is an overwhelming

passion for them, the bait that attracts them to Africa. Ivory became their religion, “The word

‘ivory’ rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A

taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse. By Jove! I’ve never

seen anything so unreal in my life. And outside, the silent wilderness surrounding this cleared

speck on the earth struck me as something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting
patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion.” Ivory, the white gold, is the only thing

of value that the Europeans in Heart of Darkness find in darkness of Africa. But ivory is also

associated with darkness and corruption. Marlow believes that Kurtz had been charmed by the

wilderness, which had "taken him, loved him, embraced him, consumed his flesh" until he had

lost all his hair, his bald head now looking like an "ivory ball." When Kurtz is on the verge of

death, just before Kurtz said his dying words, Marlow notes his "ivory face." Ivory no longer has

value; it is a thing of evil, which is what Kurtz and all of Europe became.

Middle Eastern reader’s prospective on Heart of Darkness

At first glance, reading and listening to the Heart of Darkness book and or watching Apocalypse

Now, and how it remaindered me in its orientalism in a book a read about 10 years ago by E. M.

Forster called “A Passage to India”.

Just to clarify “Orientalism”, The term “Orientalism” became a watermark with Edward Said as

an intellectual term. According to Said, Orientalism generates a series of stereotypical dichotomy

between the masculine “West” and the feminine “East” and sometime even the light “West” and

the Darkness “East”. Said’s project is to show how knowledge of Europe about the non-

Europeans was part of the process of maintaining power over them. Both novels Heart of

Darkness and A Passage to India deal with the socially and culturally subordinate groups

regarding the definition of subjectivity and the production of knowledge. These novels produce

its representation of the Orient in terms of unchangeable stereotypes and reductive categories.

However, by the time I was done reading the “Heart of Darkness”, I realized that Joseph Conrad

is not an orientalist despite some overtures. Furthermore, I think that the Heart of Darkness is a

great book to fight orientalism.

Joseph Conrad has hit a nerve in his writing, he reminded me of the “Sykes Picot agreement”

secret 1916 treaty between colonial imperial powers of the United Kingdom and France of

dividing the Middle East.

The Heart of Darkness also reminded me of what I read about the colonial imperial occupation of

the Middle East in general and Egypt in specific. The British occupation of Egypt and the French

before them dealt with the Egyptians as savages dispute the mammoth monument in front of

them called the Pyramids and the science involved in building them.

Or to name a scientist and a philosopher of many, Ibn Rushd “Averroes” he was known for his

wide-ranging commentaries and observations on Aristotle, many of which were translated into

Latin and Hebrew. The translations of his work reawakened Western European interest in

Aristotle and the Greek thinkers, an area of study that had been widely abandoned after the fall

of the Roman Empire and was considered heresy by Christianity. His opinions and views

generated controversies and debates in European Christendom, yet by the standards and norms

laid out by Marlow and Kurtz in the Heart of Darkness Averroes is one of the savages.

Conclusion

I think that Francis Coppola couldn’t have said it any better for himself and for Joseph Conrad "I

feel any artist making a film about war by necessity will make an 'anti-war' film and all war films

are usually that. My film is more of an 'anti-lie' film, in that the fact that a culture can lie about

what's really going on in warfare - that people are being brutalized, tortured, maimed and killed -

and somehow present this as moral is what horrifies me, and perpetuates the possibility of war”

The core values learned from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is important to humanity and

the understanding of it.