Summary of Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.

1. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

2. Heart of Darkness begins aboard a cruising ship, The
Nellie. As the crew wait for the tide to turn, Marlow
relates one of his inconclusive experiences, as our
framing narrator puts it.
Illustrations by Catherine Anyango

3. Marlow retells his encounter with Kurtz, a European
trader whose soul has been corrupted by greed. Marlow
recalls how he voyaged up an unnamed river to meet
Kurtz and became traumatised by his confrontation with
evil.

4. A year later he fails to repeat his story to Kurtz’s
fiancée and supresses the horror of his encounter.
This odyssey haunts Marlow: to use a clumsy
analogy Heart of Darkness is like a talk therapy
session for Marlow who tries to work through this
horror in a secure homosocial environment. Heart
of Darkness contains biographical parallels to
Conrad’s own experience of King Leopold’s
colonialized Congo, where he contracted malaria
and witnessed the nefarious degradation of the
Congolese natives, a horror Conrad refers to as his
African Nightmare in a letter to his editor.

5. Staring into the eyes of evil…

6. Marlow’s subjectivity-
shattering confrontation
with evil can be read as a
trauma-narrative…

7. And a journey through hell