Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Other Stories

Joseph Conrad’s stories share a number of themes. Heart of Darkness has been considered for most of this century not only as a literary classic, but as a powerful indictment of the evils of imperialism. It reflects the savage repressions carried out in the Congo by the Belgians in one of the largest acts of genocide committed up to that time. Conrad’s narrator encounters at the end of the story a man named Kurtz, dying, insane, and guilty of unspeakable atrocities. More recently, African critics like Chinua Achebe have pointed out that the story can be read a s a racist or colonialist parable in which Africans are depicted as innately irrational and violent, and in which Africa itself is reduced to a metaphor for that which white Europeans fear within themselves. The people of Africa and the land they live in, remain inscrutably alien, to others. The title, they argue, implies that Africa is the “heart of darkness,” where whites who ”go native” risk releasing the “savage” within themselves. Defenders of Conrad sometimes argue that the narrator does not speak in Conrad’s own voice, and that a layer of irony conceals his true views.