Defining the

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is considered among the best English works of literature. It is a story of a man named Marlow who journeys up the Congo River while working for a trading company. There Marlow encounters an English ivory trader that has hypnotized a group of natives to be under his control. The sequence of events that follows reveals Conrad’s views on the exploitation of the Congo. To best understand Conrad’…

…and he discovers the horror of his own actions as he faces the darkness in his heart. The darkness, therefore, is the internal knowledge of the travesty of imperialism. This could reflect Conrad’s personal experience in 1890 in the Congo, where he saw first-hand the evils of these exploitations. This novel was only the beginning of the criticism of this period in time, as it influenced many other authors to construct works of similar opposition.