Novel
Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad · 1902
Opening lines
The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest.
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
On a yawl at anchor in the Thames estuary, one evening, the sailor Marlow tells four men how he obtained, through an aunt, the command of a river steamer for a company on the continent. He crosses the Channel to sign his contract, then sails on a French steamer along a featureless coast. At the first station, a cliff is being dynamited for no reason and chained men carry baskets of earth. He is told of an agent, the best in the company, who sends in more ivory than all the others put together.
Context
Its author had been hired in 1890, at the age of thirty-two, to serve on a steamer of a Belgian company, and took command of it only because the captain fell ill; he stayed about six months. There he saw the Congo Free State, the personal property of a king, where ivory was then being sought. He wrote this tale eight years later from his notebooks, and described it as a wild story of a journalist who becomes a station chief and gets himself worshipped. It appeared in three instalments in an Edinburgh monthly, in February, March and April 1899, the February issue being the magazine's thousandth, and in book form in 1902.
Who it is for
A short narrative, translated into French as early as 1925 and several times since; Chinua Achebe published a critique of it in the Massachusetts Review in 1975.
Prizes and reception
Adapted for the cinema in 1979 in a film about the Vietnam War, it has been the subject since 1975 of a debate over its representation of Africa.
Sources for this page 9
The pages consulted to check this page.