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We really can not say it better than Joseph Conrad himself. A crazy story of a journalist who becomes director of a station at the (African) inside and makes himself worshipped by a tribe of savages. Thus described, the topic seems funny, but it is not. No--not funny in any way. Place in the African Interior and based on Conrad's own experiences as the captain of a Belgian steamer, Heart of Darkness is not much enjoy the rousing adventure story that it sounds like.

of colonialism. And in February of 1899, readers of Blackwood's Magazine--a high-falutin' literary match, kind of similar to The New Yorker--were treated to the very first of its three parts.

And get this: he wasn't even a native English speaker. Conrad was Polish, and he did not really learn English before he was in his twenties--and afterwards he had already discovered French. (Think about that next time you whine about having to write an article.) His works explore the seedy underbelly of imperialism, the movement of European nations to stake out assert to different far-flung parts of the planet.

Heart of Darkness is place right after the Scramble for Africa, the period of the late nineteenth century when imperial powers sliced up and doled out Africa like some particularly delicious--and ivory-rich--birthday cake.None of the Western nations really come off looking great in this entire debacle, however Belgium, sadly, looks particularly bad. They had been following the precious ivory hidden away from the African Interior, and they were not reluctant to brutalize and oppress the Africans to be able to get it. Heart of Darkness follows the disturbing travel of English ivory-trading representative Marlow, who, working for a Belgian firm, travels into the jungles of Africa in search of a mysterious man named Kurtz who appears to possess (1) become a god-like figure, and (two) gone totally off his rocker.

However, Heart of Darkness is much, much greater than a story about a trip up the lake.

Really.

Most contemporary critics concur that the novel is about the important emptiness at the heart of humankind--and speech. That is why T. S. Eliot employed a quotation from the novel as an epigraph to his poem "The Hollow Men," a very important and famous literary exploration of contemporary life.

One last and important thing: in 1975, Nigerian author Chinua Achebe spoke out from the novel. He accused it of making its purpose by dehumanizing Africans and decreasing them to extensions of the hostile and primal jungle environment. Conrad's speech was beautiful and enchanting, he explained--but it was wrong. Hmmm. Beautiful, enchanting, and wrong. To us, that sounds much like how Marlow would describe Kurtz--and it is a fantastic example of the way head-twistingly complicated this novel is.

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