Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad(1899)
Extract
The horror! The horror!
A steamboat pushes upriver through jungle that seems to close behind it like a door, carrying a man toward another who has become something the trading company did not intend. Joseph Conrad published this novella in 1899, drawing on his own journey up the Congo six years earlier. Marlow narrates at dusk on the Thames, and the doubling is deliberate: the river of commerce and the river of horror are the same. Kurtz, the brilliant emissary gone mad in the interior, is less a character than a revelation, the logical end of a civilisation that calls its plunder enlightenment. The prose is dense and hypnotic, every sentence carrying more than it can bear. Conrad forced Europe to look at the darkness it had exported and called by other names.
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