Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

I started for the inspiration and stayed for the prose. I marveled at a new form of storytelling I didn’t know about. The entire book is in the first-person perspective of a listener hearing the tale through the historic account of the main character who narrates his tale. That meant most of the book was enclosed in quotation marks with a conversational tone instead of clean statements. 

I won’t tell you the ending or any of the major events of the story. This is about my interpretation of the book and what it did for me. It’s neither a recommendation nor an invitation for a debate. But that’s the case with most of my writing. 

Still, what was the tale about? It was about Marlow, a sailor with a Belgian trading company. He was sent on an expedition through the interior of Africa in search of Kurtz, a famed ivory trader, who was said to have gone “native.” Much of the story revolved around Marlow and his crew sailing up a major river. 

I did not care for the Belgian colonization of Africa. I did not care for ivory or any of the cultural significance of the time period. What I cared about was the reflective nature of Kurtz and Marlow. I wanted to understand the indescribable pull that led Marlow to find Kurtz—a similar fashion to all the things we can’t explain but feel compelled to do on the superficial statement of curiosity. 

“I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself, not for others—what no other man can ever know.”

It’s through this story that I hoped to have a dialogue with Conrad. I wanted to hear what he thought of the human condition that led him to write this story with these characters. 

The bulk of the story revolved around Marlow’s efforts to understand who Kurtz was. He had never met Kurtz. He was learning about the target of his mission through others he met along the journey. But the ‘he said, she said’ were minor to the length of discussion Marlow had with himself as he moved from curiosity, understanding and empathy to Kurtz and why he might move away from his lofty position in the ivory trade to be with the people that were being subjugated. 

By the end of the book, I was left feeling eerie. I also felt a calming nonchalance to almost everything around me. Most of the motivations and priorities in the world looked comical and worth ignoring. I would like to think that’s what Conrad intended.

“I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurting through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretence, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew.”

I was surprised to feel a sense of utmost freedom after reading the book. Yet, it almost made the escape from the self-imposed and herd-amplified illusions of the modern world to be inescapable. I wondered if it was such dichotomies that left me feeling uneasy. It felt the only solution to uplift this sense of unease required a journey to the proverbial wilderness where I could once again be a foreigner at a foreign place. 

“…to this day I am unable to say what was Kurtz’s profession, whether he ever had any—which was the greatest of his talents.”

The way I saw it, Marlow and Kurtz were men on the same journey to find Truth. Truth that is not definable with data or research. They searched for the kind of Truth that could only be seen through the individual’s eyes by diving down the rabbit hole or taking the red pill. It required plowing deep into the heart of darkness, to see what was at the end of that road. The hope for the reader would’ve been to put the self in a state of mind ready to take the plunge and hope to make it out the other side with an inkling of Truth.