NovellaVictorian · 1899Study guide · no full textDemanding

Heart of Darkness

The frame matters: you are listening to a story about telling stories, at dusk. Conrad's difficulty is deliberate unease.

Empire Madness Class Justice

Study guide

This work is still in copyright, so there is no full text on the page. What you get instead: the context, the cast, the ideas and the themes — enough to read it well, and to know exactly what to watch for in the first thirty pages.

“Mistah Kurtz — he dead.”

The cast, in the Character Atlas →Literary devices →Where it sits in time →

Go deeper

Class — how other works handle it →Madness — how other works handle it →Justice — how other works handle it →

The castFull atlas →

Kurtz

Ivory agent, and the object of the journey

Heart of Darkness · Joseph Conrad

Wants: To be a beacon of good work in a place he can dominate.
Undone by: He confuses his own appetite with purpose.

Marlow

Sailor, and narrator

Heart of Darkness · Joseph Conrad

Wants: To reach Kurtz, and to understand what he has found.
Undone by: He keeps narrating at a distance, as if reporting could keep him clean.

Now read the first page with all of this in mind.

The notes here are the map; the book is the journey.

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