I was forced to read these two stories in senior year literature. I distinctly remembered my friend and I rolling our eyes at each from across the room as the teacher tore the book apart for symbolism and depth of meaning when all we wanted to do was READ it. Every now and then I was able to pull some random pithy sentiment out of where ever those things come from -- but I didn't remember one thing about the book except that it involved a river, a nut, and Apocalypse Now was based on it.

This time around I was able to just enjoy the story. I'm not much of a seafaring person, so I'm sure a lot of the beauty of the literature was wasted on me. I did like it, but I wasn't really overwhelmed with emotion. Worth a reread, but you'll live if you don't.

Lori Anderson

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Just fantastic. Not that anything less from Conrad was expected. But regard for something special should never be taken for granted, nor should it be deprived of its appropriate kudos when time allows.

Masterful narrative. Better than average characters. An amazing story of a place that time may always forget.

I find it funny that many critics cite Conrad's "racism" in regard to the African natives.

For one, frankly, criticizing someone from that era and background for holding black people in lower regard is like critizing people today for using the Internet. Mostly for worse, it was the attitude of the day. We can't do anything about it. Move on.

Also, I hardly doubt Conrad was necessarily being racist to begin with. The color theme of darkness and black I think has less to do with skin color and more to do with culture, progress, lifestyle and general attitudes in a place of the world that is buffered for everything else. It was a culture that put decapitated heads on spits. Tribes who launched arrows and spears at dudes on steamboats, killing people and shit. It was a people who lived in the dark, musty jungles. Jungles rife with the unknown, with death.

I guess "unknown" is the key word here. Darkness doesn't strike fear because it's black, but because you never know when you're going to stub your toe against the dresser or be attacked by a goddamned jaguar. The color of an African's skin is so inconsequential. In fact, that's my part in curing racism in the world -- quit thinking your damned skin color is so important. It isn't! It means bunk! Nobody cares!

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad would have to be one of the most complicated books I have ever read so far. I would have to be honest and say that the vocabulary used is advanced and I did have to reread pages a few times to remember what I was reading/understand. At times during the book I had no idea what was going on which made me reread over again. This book was challenging and is good at some points. Througout the book a character called Marlow is on a journey to find Kurtz. This book started in Thames River outside of London and is being taken place in Africa in a journey through the heart of Africa which is the Congo. I love how Joseph Conrad used literary devices througout the story to make us see what was actually going on and explain the darkness in the journey. I would reccomend this book to advanced readers or whom who like to challenge themselves. I will probably want to read this book once again to re-think my thoughts and further study the darkness in the book which when Marlow reaches Africa then thats when the madness starts between Marlow and his illusinations. I give thanks to Joseph Conrad for wrtiting such a complicated book because it made me work harder and search deep within my thoughts to understand. I might as well start challenging myself with other books.







This was a good great book that i should have read more then once to understand it. There are many things that the book focuses on. The book is mainly about the journey of Marlow into the Heart of Africa(Congo).Marlow is traveling down the river to find Kurtz. But the deeper he went into the Congo the deeper the darkness consumed him. I think the darkness refers to the way people start changing whitin the Congo. For example Marlow was already showing signs of his madness when he first saw the dead bodies of African people.

Horrifying vignette of the human psyche in general and the brutality of European colonizers in Africa. The spiral into madness and depravity Conrad writes about was very palpable throughout. The challenges this book poses as to what it means to be human and to be ‘known’ to someone will continue to trouble me going forward.

Heart Of Darkness didn’t live up to the hype for me. I got far more out of a study of the themes, background, and historical significance than I did out of an enjoyment on the first read. There were quite a few outstanding lines, but the narrative is maudlin and slow. I’m sure it was very progressive for its time in provocative content and style, especially for tying in psychological observation and analysis, and I’m sure that’s why even its form, which now has been repeated and surpassed, is so appreciated by many to this day. It is one of those books which I believe now belongs, stylistically at least, to early 20th century literature, although the message is still going strong.

In it, Conrad called out European colonialism, narcissism, and conventional morality for what it was: an arrogant illusion of sanity and progress. Heart Of Darkness was a mordant accusation against western modernism which pretended to be able to tame what is wild in humanity and what is unknown in the universe. It shows how flimsy is our pretense of appearing to be in control and in ‘the know’. We aren’t. We will always be far from understanding the universe if only by virtue of the fact that we are ‘in’ it, and cannot distance ourselves far enough from it and ourselves to achieve complete comprehension of our situation. We are thralls to mystery and the eternal unknown within which we lie buried, and which will forever expand itself through the cosmic wormhole running straight through the center of our being.

Conrad uses this novella as a set-up for exploring the dark and cognitively unassimilated parts of our psyche and existence, and this is what he calls the “Fascination Of the Abomination.”

“The utter savagery had closed round him—all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There’s no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination…”

What we can’t understand, what we can’t fathom, fascinates us, draws us; and yet it is deep within us the inescapable and uncharted territories of the human soul and unconscious mind. The civilized person recoils at the thought of the natural world as an untamed force, but Conrad takes us far inland, into the jungle, where large-framed pictures can’t hide the holes, and aerosol disinfectants can’t mask the rank, bacterial growth of the inhumane, intractable, and inscrutable features of Nature.

What can save one from despair in the face of this abominable incomprehension? Conrad mocks the pseudo-answers of habits and custom. “Mind, none of us would feel exactly like this [lost]. What saves us is efficiency—the devotion to efficiency.” This idea of custom as the salve to our angst is echoed later in the play by Beckett, Waiting For Godot, who wrote that “habit is a great deadener” which stifles thoughts and questions about life’s meaning which cause us distress. The great unknowns of 1) foreign minds and powers in the universe that threaten to cause one harm, and 2) the post-modern search for the purpose and meaning of life, may appear like two different things, but each one causes a certain amount of anxiety, and both are responded to by developing methods and customs that help us feel like we belong and have a handle on things. An interesting moment in the narrative comes when Marlow comes across a book in a shelter in the dark, usurping jungle which was written on the banal subject of nautical methods; and finds that the “singleness of intention” and “honest concern for the right way of going to work” makes him “forget the jungle and the pilgrims in a delicious sensation of having come upon something unmistakably real.”

The whole point of this story is for the sailor in Conrad to pistol-whip his safe, landlubber-readers with the question: how thin is the so-called ‘veneer of civilization’? He exposes culture as a thin coating which peels in the heat of privation and conflict, and quickly flakes away leaving only the real, bitter, and irreducible ‘hungers’ of the carnal instincts. “No [moral] fear can stand up to hunger, no patience can wear it out, disgust simply does not exist where hunger is; and as to superstition, beliefs, and what you may call principles, they are less than chaff in a breeze…It’s really easier to face bereavement, dishonor, and the perdition of one’s soul—than this kind of prolonged hunger. Sad, but true.” His infrared scope identifies the vital organs for the kill when he refers to modern man as “stepping delicately between the butcher [food] and the policeman [safety].” Shot through the heart, and Conrad’s to blame!!

There certainly appears to be some Victorian misogyny and probably some racism infecting the fin de siècle psychical baggage Conrad carries with him, but I do agree with Joyce Carol Oates who wrote in the introduction that he was much more advanced than others in is era, and did much to bring to consciousness the shortcomings of European imperialism and bias. Specifically he challenged the moral-spiritual squalor of Victorian decorum and opulence, and the tendency of Europeans to believe that they were morally superior to the rest of the less developed parts of the world by right of privileged birth and by dubious evidence of material success.

Conrad was intrigued with the contrast between the bewitchment of the untamed wild (the “fascination of abomination,” and the “horror” of Mr. Kurtz), and the cavalier complaisance of domesticated and dissociated society (European greed, and the melodrama of Mr. Kurtz’s fiancée). As an author he may have been experimenting with the idea of how to get back to the raw primordial forces of nature and the unconscious without sacrificing the discipline and stability of reason and community. The Wild is not as safe as it is powerful. “I wondered whether the stillness on the face of the immensity [the dark jungle] looking at us two were meant as an appeal or as a menace… Could we handle that dumb thing, or would it handle us?” And in the end, Marlow returns to his society, to his people and his customs and his habits. As if nothing ever happened. But the spectacle of his conscious duplicity is made very explicit in his final conversation with Kurtz’ fiancée-widow which caricatures the European attitude so wonderfully and magnifies Conrad’s disgust for upper-class theatrics and hypocrisy. A year after Kurtz’s death his engaged is still melodramatically woeful about her loss. She practically swoons all over the place in front of Marlow boasting of Kurtz’s fine modern ideals and righteous superiority, and begs of Marlow to corroborate her convictions about her husband’s worth. Marlow watches her histrionics and finally decides to play to them. Instead of revealing to her that he saw the transmogrification of Kurtz and had witnessed his final words in which he acknowledged the deep and writhing darkness that is life—“Horror! Horror!”—he instead dumbs down the climactic ending of Kurtz and tells instead that he died whispering her name to the very end. Isn’t that nice. But he’s shocked and obviously disappointed that the ceiling doesn’t cave in on him, or more importantly, on anyone else for lying the civilized lie of hypocrisy and egocentrism. “The heavens do not fall for such a trifle.”

Did Conrad desire a peeling away of civilization’s mask, and a return to the freedom, mystery, and power of the wild in some sense? Yes and no. I think he saw in it, as did many modern psychologists and philosophers, a raw, unharnessed force that could potentially help to enhance creativity and vigor; or it could be very destructive. Mr. Kurtz went feral, to his own demise and to the demise of others around him, but he successfully escaped the cheap substitute of being a decent citizen which couldn’t quite satisfy the primal instinct for adventure, mystery, and power. Then again, he killed and died. So, there’s that. Tipping the scale either way brings extreme ennui, angst of meaninglessness, suffering, or death.
And for anyone who doesn’t know, anything Conrad can do, London can do better, and with less words. Jack London wrote The Call Of the Wild and The Sea Wolf on this same topic, and his authorial execution of the ‘return to the wild’ theme, which was his specialty, is much more muscular and sportive in nearly all of his works. Conrad is much more wordy and formal in his narrative, while London lets loose with a cunning, creativity, and pompous confidence that makes his words cut to the quick and soar above careful writers like Conrad.

Search your feelings Luke. You know it’s true. Just my humble opinion. But I’m right.

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I had a really hard time with this book, even though it wasn't very long. First of all, the constant use of quotation mark (it's a frame story) annoyed me. In addition, the prose wasn't particularly awesome. Sure, there were a couple passages that were memorable, but, on the whole, I wasn't impressed. As for the story, it's about a sailor going up a river in Africa to meet the god-like "Mistah Kurtz." This journey, of course, is a metaphor for a journey into the human soul. I read this book because I thought it would better help me understand T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men. I also understand it is one of precursors to the Modernist movement, so it should definitely be read. I think it's one of those books (I find myself saying this often) that I will re-read and hopefully appreciate more. I probably should have taken more time to read it, and should have gotten my own copy so I could make marks in it. On the whole, I'm glad to be rid of this book, for now. I felt like I was fighting off boredom and incomprehension half the time I was reading it. Have a good day.

Well, I must say, I found these stories disappointing. All of the expectations I had about them were dashed as I waded through Conrad's wordy prose. Perhaps the Interior of Man where all the action takes place is too deep for me. I didn't see the big deal in the Secret Sharer novella or the mystery and madness in Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. Too much talking, not enough explication. I freely admit, though, that trying to read them right now--with a bad head-cold, in short interrupted bursts--may not have been the environment most conducive to appreciating them. Perhaps I'll get more out of them later? If I do read them again with the kids?

“Droll thing life is—that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself—that comes too late—a crop of inextinguishable regrets.”

I usually don’t include quotes in my reviews, but the last ten to fifteen pages of Heart of Darkness is one of the best payoffs in literature. Conrad does a masterful job building toward the end through setting and tone, not going overboard with his description of the environment; he says just enough to pull the reader into this oppressive wilderness, and to instill them with that sense of foreboding, and ultimate doom.

This was another book that I dodged being assigned in high school, and has sat on my shelf for many years. Reading King Leopold’s Ghost is actually what inspired me to finally pick this up. Anyone interested in learning the true atrocities committed in the Congo without the uncomfortable early twentieth century quasi-racist lens that sometimes becomes apparent in Conrad’s narrative, I would refer them to that grim historical account.

read the Heart of Darkness, I wanted to like Marlow so much but his character arc was basically nonexistent

Since this book was made by a Polish man i wiouldn't except it to be that much interesting being that he was an immigrant and jusst learning English ,but this book to me had alot of important quotes that can mean an infinate amount of things that many people can relate to. What i thought the "QUOTE" Heart of Darkness means is exactly the role that Marlow played in the book. He was the on who belived in taking over land , but at the same time he still believes that his b;elieve is actually wrong. I also think that the term Heart of Darkness meant that the more that you try to hold something back the sicker you get,mentally and phsically. Overall in my opinion this book was pretty boring compared to many other book that i have read recently.

This book was an all-around good book. The intro was very detailed, but could confuse some readers with the vocabulary. This book is for the higher level readers that are able to comprehend the words and metaphors. For example, in the beginning I had trouble with it and didnt know if he was in Britan or the Congo. Joseph Conrad has an interesting way of using insanity to suit a certain event in the book. For example when Captain Marlow is waiting on the ship. He says that he is waiting, and the waiting is driving him crazy. The wait for permission from the manager was eating at him like crazy. Malaria also plays a big role in the book. Before Marlow went into the jungle, the doctor inspected him, because he said that nobody came out of the jungle the same, some of them went crazy.
I would reccomend this book to experienced readers. The intro might be hard to understand, but it gets easier as you go along. After the first 15 pages, the plot seems to come together.

This book was okay but this book was a really good challenge to read its about Marlow who is telling his story on his journey to find Kurtz this book is very hard to read that you might to read hilight or put sticky notes in order for you to fully understand the whole meaning of the book.In the beginning they start off on a boat and then later on you figure out that the narrartor of the story who is Marlow telling the story about his mission to the heart of darkness or the congo of africa to find kurtz a ivory carver and bring him back on the way he meets many african people who he describes as savages and things so you could say that this book also had a racist perspective to it