Heart of Darkness

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1899

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Themes

Imperialism and Colonialism

Imperialism and colonialism are recurrent themes throughout the entire text. Marlow and Kurtz are both parts of an imperial machine, helping to extract the wealth of a distant African country in the name of profit. The novel’s approach to these themes can be complicated. From their positions within the imperial context, both men struggle to find the points at which their involvement begins and ends. Marlow seems to veer between offering acute criticisms of the imperial structure and being entirely complicit in its actions. His journey along the river presents him with scenes of violence, torture, and slavery. This is entirely unilateral; Europeans beat, imprison, and force Africans into labor.

On one hand, by presenting these scenes in their full horror, the novel provides necessary examples ready for critique and rarely flinches from the violence endured by the enslaved. On the other hand, Marlow seems to agree with the majority of the Company’s ideologies; he simply disagrees with the praxis and the extremity. He works for the Company, he takes their money, and he achieved his position not through skill and hard work but through nepotism. When meeting with his aunt, he tries to dissuade her of the idea that the Company is working for benevolent purposes but quickly gives up. The lie is more comfortable for Marlow, whether he is drinking tea with his aunt or witnessing the vindictive beating of a near-slave.

This tension between honesty and hypocrisy is also evident in Kurtz. Unlike Marlow and the other Company men, Kurtz has little pretense about his actions. He knows that he is not trading with the locals; he is extracting their wealth by force and attempting to make himself into a ruler or a deity in the process. He does not care at all for the locals and is happy to see them exterminated. This honesty, this bluntness about the use of force and violence, is exactly why Kurtz is not permitted to continue by the Company. He is speaking the subtext aloud; while the Company operates behind the veil of moral benevolence on the idea of “bringing civilization to the dark continent,” Kurtz has abandoned this idea and embraced the violent, harsh reality. Kurtz is the untethered imperial id and thus must be exterminated before he threatens the imperial structure.

The Absurdity of Morality

The effect of Kurtz’s role in the book is to reveal the inherent absurdity of the morality preached by the European characters. This is evident throughout Marlow’s journey: from his aunt who cheerfully ignores the Company’s profit motive to the purposeless Brickmaker who hopes to make a fortune from proximity alone to the countless bureaucrats who do little more than diligently note numbers in a book, counting only the ivory and not the blood shed in its name. Each person Marlow meets is, in some fashion, absurd. Many are hypocrites and the only man who seems in any way honest about his situation is Kurtz, who happens to be both dying and insane. The situation is untenable and violence, the extraction of wealth from an entire continent, is hidden behind the veil of civilization.

Like the themes of imperialism and colonialism, there is a difficult presentation of the topic. Marlow is hardly an idealistic hero and the novel’s primary antagonist, Kurtz, is simply an evolution of the Company whose employees dominate the narrative (and include Marlow). At all stages of the novel, characters must make compromises, thus suggesting that the idea of strict morals is inherently absurd and unworkable. Marlow is the best example of this. He has a job to do and rarely questions what it means to enact his job, all the while being dispirited with the Company’s treatment of the locals. He loathes the bureaucrats but sits and drinks with them. He cannot comprehend what Kurtz has become but the entire story is an attempt to explain to his audience on the Nellie the nature of the man.

Throughout all these parts of the journey, trying to provide a consistent, sincere, and objective critique of events is impossible and absurd. Taking any moral position in a situation in which morality has become so extreme is unmanageable. Attempts to bring civilization to the continent have only resulted in the Europeans abandoning those moral positions they used to hold most dear. They preach civilization and then lose their ability to act in a civil manner. While most characters cannot acknowledge this inherent absurdity and hypocrisy, Kurtz embraces it. In many ways, Kurtz is the purest expression of the theme, though every other member of the Company mirrors his actions to some degree.

Horror and Despondency

The novel’s most famous quote—“The horror! The horror!” (147)—has come to function as a byword for the themes of terror, fear, and despondency presented in the text. While Kurtz’s dying words are filled with loathing, they speak to a helplessness many of the European characters. They dutifully follow the Company’s orders; any expression of agency or disagreement would be futile. This leads to many of the novel’s most violent scenes, many of which include Marlow standing silently by as Europeans beat and enslave Africans on Company orders. He sees a French ship mindlessly shelling a blank stretch of jungle. He nearly falls into a hole dug by the slaves, a hole that has little purpose beyond simply occupying the slaves’ time. The Europeans use explosives to blow holes in rocks but are unsure why. Marlow recounts each of these stories as though he is shocked at futility of their actions. He rarely acts, choosing passive documentation rather than active intervention. Marlow, like the other Company employees, is swallowed whole by the despondency of the situation. He too is following Company orders, travelling across the world on the word of a man in a Belgian office.

This sense of futility imbues the novel with ambivalence. The text is filled with contradictions and hypocrisies that go unchallenged, or—if they are challenged—unremedied. Marlow himself acts out this ambivalence. He is told about his predecessor Fresleven, a Danish boat captain who was killed by the locals. Marlow is told that Fresleven was harmless and friendly, a truth that he willingly accepts. Marlow also relates how the man entered a violent dispute with the locals, arguing about something so petty as chickens to the point where he was killed by a spear. The inherent discrepancy about the notion of Fresleven as a friendly innocent and yet also a man willing to enter into a violent conflict over hens is absurd. Marlow listens to and repeats what he has heard; the horrific nature of the death shocks no one and they have been rendered despondent enough to leave the story unchallenged. Like Marlow’s ability to be repulsed by acts of violence against the locals and yet still not see them as his equals, he has internalized this contradiction. The characters’ only choice is to accept their role in the machine of the world’s power structure.