Aboard a boat moored on the Thames, the seaman Charles Marlow tells his companions the story of a journey that changed him. Years earlier, working for a Belgian trading company, Marlow travelled up the Congo River into the heart of the African interior to relieve Kurtz, a brilliant and celebrated ivory agent who has fallen silent at a remote inner station.
What Marlow finds along the way is a catalogue of colonial greed and cruelty — abandoned machinery, dying labourers, and a rapacious enterprise dressed up in the language of civilization — and at the end of it, Kurtz himself: a man who came to Africa full of noble ideals and was hollowed out by unchecked power and his own appetites. The closer Marlow draws to him, the more the "darkness" of the title reveals itself as something in the colonizers, and perhaps in every human heart.
First published in 1899, Joseph Conrad's short novel is a landmark of literary modernism, famous for its dense, atmospheric prose and its unsparing, if much-debated, view of European imperialism. It remains one of the most analyzed and contested works in English literature.