Under humanitarian pretenses, Leopold’s agents, who had’ begun the process of conquest several years earlier, effectively turned the so-called Congo Free State into an enormous forced labor camp for the extraction of ivory and, later, after the world-wide rubber boom in the early 1890s following the popularization of the pneumatic tire, rubber. In addition to outright murders, the slave labor conditions led to many deaths from starvation and disease as well as a steeply declining birth rate. Even during an era in which most Europeans viewed imperialism as legitimate, the appalling circumstances of Leopold’s Congo (it would officially become a Belgian colony in 1908, and Leopold would die the following year never having so much as visited the territory) led to international outrage. Conservative demographic estimates place the region’s depopulation toll between 1880 and 1920 at ten million people—that is, half of the total population—with the worst of the carnage occurring between 1890 and 1910. Not much was known outside Africa about the conditions of Leopold’s rule when Conrad was there, but in the several years before he began writing Heart of Darkness, in 1898, it became an international scandal, and regular reports appeared in the British and European press denouncing the abuses. Even before the publicity and protests, however (which would peak several years after the novella’s publication), Conrad had seen enough on his own to be thoroughly disgusted.

Yet it is important to recognize that while parts of Heart of Darkness are based on Conrad’s experiences and that it does register his sense of moral outrage, the book is neither a work of autobiography nor history, and (as we shall see, the controversy over how to read it demonstrates) it presents considerable interpretive difficulties. Although the fictional structure is the same as that of “Youth”—again, we have a frame-tale narrative with the Englishman Marlow recounting his experiences to the same quartet of middle-aged men—it is a much more complex work. The terms of that complexity are elucidated in the opening pages by the unnamed primary narrator, who precedes his recapitulation of Marlow’s tale with a figurative description of how this raconteur’s mode of storytelling differs from that of his less-sophisticated seafaring peers:

The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine (p. 40).

We are presented here with images that illustrate not only two different narrative methods but two distinct epistemologies. On the one hand, in the first sentence we have the typical seaman’s story depicted as presenting no, interpretive problems whatsoever: telling a tale is a straightforward process whose aim is to reveal an unambiguous and easily accessible kernel of truth for the listener’s edification. On the other hand, in the second, more elaborate sentence, Marlow’s stories are depicted (as the primary narrator will later term them) as utterly “inconclusive” (p. 42): telling a story in this manner is aimed not at providing definitive enlightenment, but rather, as Ian Watt puts it, to lead the listener to become aware of “a circumambient universe of meanings which are not normally visible, but which the story, the glow, dimly illuminates” (Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, p. 180). We are thus apprised from the outset that the tale we are about to hear will resist traditional interpretive techniques, will undermine our sense of how to read— indeed, will destabilize our very notion of “meaning” itself. This passage, in fact, is one of the classic statements of a modernist epistemology, and it thus serves as a useful primer for how to approach not only the story Marlow will proceed to tell but also Conrad’s text as a whole.

The aspects of Marlow’s storytelling method that impede our efforts to arrive at an unambiguous understanding of his tale’s meaning also hinder us from gaining a clear apprehension of the events themselves, something attested to by many first-time readers of the text who have difficulties following the plot. Such complications are in keeping with the modernist inclination for making narrative increasingly a function of individual subjectivity—a process that writers of the subsequent generation, such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, would take still further. With broad brush strokes, however, the plot of the story that Marlow dimly conveys through ruminations interspersed with bits and pieces of events runs as follows. Having secured a position with a Belgian ivory-trading company through the contacts of his Brussels-residing aunt, Marlow travels to Africa, where he is to captain a ship up the Congo River in order to recall a company agent named Kurtz who has cut himself off from all communications. Upon arriving in Africa, Marlow finds that the company conducts its business with terrible cruelty toward its Congolese employees. He also finds that the competition for power among the company agents is ruthless, and that Kurtz is widely resented by his colleagues for his alleged humanitarianism. When Marlow and his crew finally arrive at Kurtz’s compound several months later, however, they discover that the idealistic ivory trader has established himself as a virtual deity among the indigenous people, whom he has been ruling with bloodthirsty savagery. Mad and gravely ill, Kurtz is forcibly retrieved by Marlow and then dies on the return voyage. During their brief acquaintance Marlow finds himself drawn to Kurtz, despite his knowledge of the latter’s monstrous conduct, and Kurtz reciprocates by entrusting him with various personal effects. Soon after, a now ill and disoriented Marlow returns to Europe, where he recovers his physical health but remains profoundly disturbed by the memory of his experiences. Some months later, in an apparent effort to effect closure, he meets with Kurtz’s grief-stricken fiancee, but, rather than telling her the truth about the depraved conduct of her beloved, he perpetuates her belief that Kurtz was a benevolent humanitarian who was devoted to her. He does, however, disclose the truth some years later to a handful of friends in the form of the tale that is then transmitted to us by one of them.

Marlow prefaces his account of his experiences in the Congo, which he narrates while on a yacht on the Thames, with some observations about imperialism in general. He begins by anticipating one of the central themes of his tale—the collapse of the distinction between civilization and barbarism—by recalling that Britain itself, the world’s foremost imperial power, was at one time a colony of a mighty empire: alluding to the Roman invasion and conquest of Britain more than 1,800 years earlier, his first words are “[a]nd this also... has been one of the dark places of the earth” (p. 39).