A powerful meditation on the relationship between "civilization" and "savagery," Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness reflects on the relationship between the civilized man and the barbarity that boils beneath the surface of every human being. Seduced up the Congo River by spellbinding English prose, the reader is immersed in a world stripped of all order where chaos ensues and all civilized intentions are crushed before the vengeful aspect of the heart of the land itself. It is a world of beauty and terror, frightening and fascinating, every second plunging the reader deeper into a "strange world of plants, water, and silence".
Conquering the physical oppressions brought on him as he travels throughout the jungle on his mission for the Belgian ivory trading company, Marlow, a cynical and highly intellectual seaman in the wake of European imperialism who undertakes a quest into the savage jungle to find the illustrious head of the inner station, Kurtz. Kurtz, a highly gifted artist and once a journalist, is a man whom Marlow finds has lost touch with reality. He has indulged himself in truly "barbaric" behavior and is worshipped by the natives as a god. Marlow, appalled, believes the "powers of darkness" have "claimed him for their own." Marlow steals Kurtz away from his frenzied followers to bring him back to the "real" world; however, reluctant to leave his crumbling asylum of savagery, Kurtz dies on the way. At his transition into darkness, Kurtz utters his last words, "the horror! the horror!," a final proclamation which addresses the mysterious heart of the novel itself.
As Marlow embarks upon his tedious excursion through the depths of his own consciousness, as he travels through this isolated garden of foliage, earth and shrubbery hardly fit to call a jungle, he visualizes two things. First, the hypocracy of European imperialism shown by his and the rest of the company's dehumanization of the native Africans and their attempts to justify it as a benevolent project of civilization as revealed throughout his travels in the Congo.
