In this respect the story, which Conrad had considered titling “The Second Self,” “The Secret Self,” and “The Other Self,” participates in the motifs of the Doppelgänger literary tradition, of which Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) is a particularly influential example.

Some of the most interesting interpretive possibilities for the story, in fact, are based on the assumption that the young captain’s intense identification with his alter ego may render his judgment, and perhaps even his veracity, suspect. Indeed, the confidence with which he claims that he understands the circumstances of the killing and how to interpret them (based solely on Leggatt’s own exculpatory version of the events) is remarkable for the uncritical frame of mind it discloses: “I knew well enough... that my double there was no homicidal ruffian. I did not think of asking him for details, and he told me the story roughly in brusque, disconnected sentences. I needed no more” (p. 161). And when the captain of the ship on which the killing has occurred comes aboard and tells his version of the story, the narrator dismisses it by asserting that “[i]t is not worth while to record that version” (p. 173). Thus, the sole opportunity we have to hear a potential counternarrative to Leggatt’s account is suppressed. At the beginning of the tale the narrator describes himself as having been both “a stranger to the ship [and] ... a stranger to myself” (p. 155), and the circumstances with which he is subsequently faced will resolve precisely into a conflict between his professional duties to his ship and his moral duties to his conscience. Yet even though he has violated his professional code by sheltering a fugitive from justice and willfully endangered his crew, the story nonetheless concludes with his idealized vision of himself as experiencing “the perfect communion of a seaman with his first command” and of Leggatt as “a free man, a proud swimmer striking out for a new destiny” (p. 193). That is, he appears to believe he has reconciled the seemingly contradictory exigencies with which he has been faced. Whether we concur that this judgment is sound or believe his representation of the events to be, either consciously or unconsciously, self-serving is an open matter. Indeed, much of the story’s artistry inheres in its tantalizing capacity for generating interpretations that differ from that offered by the narrator-captain.

Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness (1899) is one of the most broadly influential works in the history of British literature. The novella’s diverse attributes—its rich symbolism, intricate plotting, evocative prose, penetrating psychological insights, broad allusiveness, moral significance, metaphysical suggestiveness—have earned for it the admiration of literary scholars and critics, high school and college teachers, and general readers alike. Further, its impact can be gauged not only by the frequency with which it is read, taught, and written about, but also by its cultural fertility. It has heavily influenced works ranging from T. S. Eliot’s landmark poem The Waste Land (1922), the manuscript of which has as its original epigraph a passage from the book that concludes with the last words of Conrad’s anti-hero Kurtz, to Barbara Kingsolver’s novel The Poisonwood Bible (1998), which updates the tale to the years shortly before and after independence, when the Belgian Congo became the nation that is known today as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Nor has its artistic influence been limited to literature; to cite only the most famous instance, it served as the basis for Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now (1979), which transposes the story, in both place and time, to Vietnam and Cambodia during the American-Vietnamese War and recasts Kurtz as a renegade American colonel. Its various homages aside, in its original form Heart of Darkness has for several generations influenced the literary and moral outlook of innumerable readers. Yet while the text is widely recognized as an indictment of the greed, and ruthlessness that generally drove European imperialism in Africa, most readers are unfamiliar with the fact that the setting is the event in imperial history so uniquely horrific in its sheer scale of suffering and death that it has been termed the African Holocaust. As Conrad himself would characterize the situation in the Congo nearly a quarter of a century after his novella was published, it was “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience” (“Geography and Some Explorers,” p. 17).

Set during the era of heightened competition for imperial territories that historians have termed the New Imperialism, Heart of Darkness is loosely based on Conrad’s experiences and observations during a six-month stint, in 1890, in the Congo as an employee of a Belgian company, the Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo. This was five years after the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference, a meeting of representatives of the European powers to establish the terms according to which much of the continent of Africa would be divided among them. During this meeting, King Leopold II of Belgium, skillfully playing the jealousies and fears of rival powers off one another, astonishingly managed to secure as his own property over 900,000 square miles of central Africa—that is, a territory roughly seventy-five times the size of the diminutive country he ruled.