Reading Order
Heart of Darkness Reading Order
Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899) is a complete standalone novella. It is narrated by Charles Marlow, who recounts his journey up the Congo River as the captain of a steamboat for a Belgian ivory-trading company — and his search for Kurtz, a company agent who has become a god to the native people and who, near death, whispers 'The horror, the horror.' One of the most widely taught and debated works in English literature, it inspired the film Apocalypse Now (1979).
Where to start
Heart of Darkness
Complete Heart of Darkness Book List
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Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad·1899·Standalone novella — Marlow's journey up the Congo to find Kurtz; under 100 pages; one of the most important works in English literature, and one of the most debated; the source of Apocalypse Now; can be read in a single sitting - Buy
Lord Jim
OptionalJoseph Conrad·1900·Conrad's novel of a ship's officer who abandons a sinking pilgrim ship and spends the rest of his life trying to redeem himself; the companion to Heart of Darkness in his major work, and a fuller account of the colonial world it depicts - Buy
The Secret Agent
OptionalJoseph Conrad·1907·Conrad's novel of a secret agent and an anarchist bombing plot in London — darker and more political than Heart of Darkness, set in Europe rather than Africa; one of the first spy novels in English literature
Heart of Darkness — Frequently Asked Questions
Is Heart of Darkness a standalone?
Yes — Heart of Darkness is entirely self-contained. It was originally published in three installments in Blackwood's Magazine in 1899 and collected in the volume Youth: A Narrative; and Two Other Stories in 1902. Conrad's other major works — Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907) — are independent.
Is Heart of Darkness racist?
The question of Conrad's treatment of Africans in Heart of Darkness is one of the most seriously debated in literary criticism. The Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe made the most influential argument against the novel in a 1975 lecture, 'An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness,' in which he argued that Conrad uses Africans as a backdrop for Kurtz's psychological disintegration without granting them any interiority or humanity of their own. Achebe's critique is widely taken seriously, and it has changed how the novel is taught. Conrad's defenders argue that he was writing a critique of colonialism rather than a celebration of it, and that the novel's perspective is limited by its narrator, Marlow, not identical with Conrad's own. Both positions have been elaborated by subsequent critics.
What does Heart of Darkness mean?
Heart of Darkness is set on the Congo River in the Belgian Congo — a real place where the Belgian colonial system was inflicting systematic atrocities against the African population (King Leopold II's regime in the Congo was responsible for the deaths of millions, and Conrad had visited the region in 1890). The 'heart of darkness' refers simultaneously to the interior of Africa (as European geography imagined it), the interior of the colonial enterprise (which shows what European civilization is actually capable of), and the interior of the individual psyche (which, when freed from social constraints, reveals itself as Kurtz). The three meanings cannot be fully separated.
How does Heart of Darkness relate to Apocalypse Now?
Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) transplants the basic structure of Heart of Darkness from the Belgian Congo in the 1890s to Vietnam in the late 1960s: Captain Willard (Marlow) is sent up a river in Cambodia to find and kill Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a Green Beret who has gone rogue and established himself as a god to the local people. The dialogue, the frame narrative, and key scenes closely follow Conrad's novella, though Coppola adds substantial material from Michael Herr's Vietnam memoir Dispatches.
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