Book Review: Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad is an incredibly short novel; it’s divided into three chapters, and I read it in three days, one part per night before I went to bed. So it’s a quick read if you want a short classic between chunky, hunky classics. 

The best part of the book is arguably its writing. I had to read the first page slowly to get used to the writing style, but it was easy to catch onto, and the rest of the novel was a breeze. The writing is a bit disjointed, told “orally” by an unreliable narrator, with a bunch of symbolism and metaphors (and I love me some metaphors), and the imagery is very vivid. The imagery is genuinely outstanding; Conrad can describe his surroundings with such originality and detail. The writing and format imbues a sense of ambiguity, which is yet another symbol of darkness (which pervades the entire book), as you know if you were ever a literature major studying 17th or 18th century writing (seriously, I was surprised how much that came up when I was in college). Conrad intentionally used a lot of adjectives to slow down the reading and make us think; it’s not an action-packed novel; he wanted us to digest the symbolism of the plot more than the plot itself.

The novel starts off with a few men on a boat at night, the narrator Marlow starts to tell them a story, and the rest of the novel is the continuation of the story. This format was masterful in some ways, but it also creates a weakness. It intensified the sense of ambiguity, which Conrad layered into every part of his novel, and it allowed Conrad to portray the intense struggle the orator was experiencing and reliving when telling the story. But there were times where I didn’t feel the gravity of the situation as much as Marlow was trying to convey. Marlow was right when he told his audience that they couldn’t possibly understand what he went through since they weren’t there. On one hand, I feel like that’s the point of literature—to empathize with a foreign experience, but I also can’t argue with the honesty.

As for the plot, I can’t really discuss it without discussing racism in the book. Some reviews totally ignore the racism, and others entirely focus on the racism. Yes, the narrator did perceive the Africans as inferior in some aspects to the more industrialized whites, and there were far too many instances of the n word for my comfort. Joseph Conrad judges both the whites and the blacks in the novel; in fact, a main point of the novel was to prove that the white’s cruelty and greed while in the Congo made them more barbaric than the African “savages,” but in order for Conrad to make that distinction, the Africans had to be put on a lower level in the first place, and made a point that it was more awful that the whites had managed to go lower. Both Conrad and the narrator of the novel were products of the time, a lack of education/understanding, and Conrad’s own experience in Africa. He considered the Africans savages, but he was sickened by their mistreatment, because he also considered them humans worthy of compassion, so in that regard, he was amongst the forward-thinkers of his time.

I admire the anti-colonial sentiment of the novel, and I particularly like the levels of symbolism used to convey this message throughout the novel (although I’m sure some people might find it heavy-handed). I usually say something about the characters in my book reviews, but the characters aren’t really the point of the novel; they are supposed to serve as yet another symbolic layer. The strongest character of the novel is Kurtz, who serves as the ultimate symbol of how ambition is so easily corrupted. So, long story short, if you like symbolism, read the novel; if you can’t stand it, approach with caution.