Heart of Darkness
Heart of Darkness (1899) is a novella by Polish-English novelist Joseph Conrad about a narrated voyage up the Congo River into the Congo Free State in the so-called "heart of Africa". Charles Marlow, the narrator, tells his story to friends aboard a boat anchored on the River Thames. This setting provides the frame for Marlow's story of his obsession with the ivory trader Kurtz, which enables Conrad to create a parallel between what Conrad calls "the greatest town on earth", London, and Africa as places of darkness.
International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs
"Heart of Darkness" tells the story of Charles Marlow, an Englishman who took a foreign assignment from a Belgian trading company as a ferry-boat captain in Africa. The novel is widely regarded as both critiquing the imperialist expansion into Africa, whilst also examining the themes of power dynamics and morality. Although Conrad does not give the name of the river, at the time of writing the Congo Free State, the location of the large and important Congo River, was a private colony of Belgium's King Leopold II. Marlow is given a text by Kurtz, an ivory trader working a distance into Africa along the Congo river. Marlow, a recurring character and alter ego of Conrad himself, describes that journal as “a beautiful piece of writing” or “vibrating with eloquence”, among others. Kurtz has already been described as a poet, so this description fits the conception of Kurtz as a man of artistic ability. Marlow finds a quotation by Kurtz in which he asserts that whites “must necessarily appear to them in the nature of supernatural beings – we approach them with the might of a deity”, one of a series of suggestions of that Kurtz regards himself elevated to a godlike position. The document is ended with the sentence, handwritten at a later date, “Exterminate all the Brutes!”.