A group of men are aboard an English ship that is sitting on the Thames. The group includes a, an, a Company /Captain, and a man without a specific profession who is named. The narrator appears to be another unnamed guest on the ship. While they are loitering about, waiting for the wind to pick up so that they might resume their voyage, Marlow begins to speak about London and Europe as some of the darkest places on earth. The narrator and other guests do not seem to regard him with much respect. Marlow is a stationary man, very unusual for a seaman. The others do not understand him because he does not fit into a neat category in the same manner that the others do.

He mentions colonization and says that carving the earth into prizes or pieces is not something to examine too closely because it is an atrocity. He then begins to narrate a personal experience in Africa, which led him to become a freshwater sailor and gave him a terrible glimpse of colonization. With the exception of two or three small paragraphs, the perspective shifts to Marlow, who becomes the main narrator for the rest of the novel.Marlow has always had a passion for travel and exploration. Maps are an obsession of his. Marlow decides he wants nothing more than to be the skipper of a steamship that travels up and down a river in Africa. His aunt has a connection in the Administration Department of a seafaring and exploration company that gathers ivory, and she manages to get Marlow an appointment.

He replaces a captain who was killed in a skirmish with the natives. When Marlow arrives at the company office, the atmosphere is extremely dim and foreboding. He feels as if everyone is looking at him pityingly. The doctor who performs his physical asks if there is a history of insanity in Marlow's family.

He tells Marlow that nothing could persuade him to join the Company down in the Congo. This puzzles Marlow, but he does not think much of it. The next day he embarks on a one-month journey to the primary Company station. The African shores that he observes look anything but welcoming. They are dark and rather desolate, in spite of the flurry of human activity around them. When he arrives, Marlow learns that a company member recently committed suicide. There are multitudes of chain-gang types, who all look at him with vacant expressions.

A young boy approaches Marlow, looking very empty. Marlow can do nothing but offer him some ship biscuits.

Book Summary Heart of Darkness begins on the deck of the Nellie, a British ship anchored on the coast of the Thames. The anonymous narrator, the Director of Companies, the Accountant, and Marlow sit in silence. An introduction to and summary of the novella Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. The book was an inspiration for Francis Ford Coppola's Vietnam War film.

He is very relieved to leave the boy behind as he comes across a very well-dressed man who is the picture of respectability and elegance. They introduce themselves: he is the of the Company. Marlow befriends this man and frequently spends time in his hut while the Accountant goes over the accounts. After ten days of observing the Chief Accountant's ill temper, Marlow departs for his 200-mile journey into the interior of the Congo, where he will work for a station run by a man named.The journey is arduous. Marlow crosses many paths, sees deserted dwellings, and encounters black men working. Marlow never describes them as humans. Throughout the novel, the white characters refer to them in animalistic terms.

Marlow finally arrives at a secondary station, where he meets the, who for now will oversee his work. It is a strange meeting. The Manager smiles in a manner that is very discomfiting. The ship on which Marlow is supposed to set sail is broken.

While they await the delivery of the rivets needed to fix it, Marlow spends his time on more mundane tasks. He frequently hears the name 'Kurtz' around the station. Clearly everyone knows his future boss. It is rumored that he is ill. Soon the entire crew will depart for a trip to Kurtz's station.The Manager's uncle arrives with his own expedition. Marlow overhears them saying that they would like to see Kurtz and his assistant hanged so that their station could be eliminated as ivory competition. After a day of exploring, the expedition has lost all of their animals.

Marlow sets out for Kurtz's station with the, the cannibal crew, and the Manager. About eight miles from their destination, they stop for the night. There is talk of an approaching attack. Rumor has it that Kurtz may have been killed in a previous one. Some of the pilgrims go ashore to investigate. The whirring sound of arrows is heard; an attack is underway. The Pilgrims shoot back from the ship with rifles.

The helmsman of the ship is killed, as is a native ashore. Marlow supposes that Kurtz has perished in the inexplicable attack. This upsets him greatly.

Over the course of his travels, he has greatly looked forward to meeting this man. Marlow shares Kurtz's background: an English education, a woman at home waiting for him. In spite of Marlow's disappointment, the ship presses onward. A little way down the river, the crew spot Kurtz's station, which they had supposed was lost. They meet a man who resembles a harlequin. He says that Kurtz is alive but somewhat ill.

The natives do not want Kurtz to leave because he has expanded their minds. Kurtz does not want to leave because he has essentially become part of the tribe.After talking for a while with the Russian, Marlow has a very clear picture of the man who has become his obsession. Finally, he has the chance to talk to Kurtz, who is ill and on his deathbed. The natives surround his hut until he tells them to leave. While on watch, Marlow dozes off and realizes that Kurtz is gone. He chases him and finds Kurtz in the forest. He does not want to leave the station because his plans have not been fully realized.

Marlow manages to take him back to his bed. Kurtz entrusts Marlow with all of his old files and papers. Among these is a photograph of his sweetheart. The Russian escapes before the Manager and others can imprison him. The steamboat departs the next day. Kurtz dies onboard a few days later, Marlow having attended him until the end.Marlow returns to England, but the memory of his friend haunts him.

He manages to find the woman from the picture, and he pays her a visit. She talks at length about his wonderful personal qualities and about how guilty she feels that she was not with him at the last. Marlow lies and says that her name was the last word spoken by Kurtz—the truth would be too dark to tell her.

How To Cite in MLA Format Montalvo, Jessica. John Untermacher, October 15, 2007, and Adam Kissel, ed.

'Heart of Darkness Summary'. GradeSaver, 11 November 2007 Web.

Heart of Darkness IntroductionWe really can't say it better than himself. Heart of Darkness is:A wild story of a journalist who becomes manager of a station in the (African) interior and makes himself worshipped by a tribe of savages. Thus described, the subject seems comic, but it isn't. No—not comic at all.Set in the African Interior and based on Conrad's own experiences as the captain of a Belgian steamer, Heart of Darkness isn't much like the rousing adventure story that it sounds like. It's less Indiana Jones and the Ivory Traders than, psychological horror with a dash of the horrors (the horrors!) of colonialism. And in February of 1899, readers of Blackwood's Magazine—a high-falutin' literary rag, kind of like The New Yorker—were treated to the first of its three parts.Conrad is one of the most important English writers of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.

And get this: he wasn't even a native English speaker. Conrad was Polish, and he didn't actually learn English until he was in his twenties—and after he'd already learned French. (Think about that next time you complain about having to write an essay.) His works explore the seedy underbelly of imperialism, the move of European countries to stake out claim to various far-flung parts of the world.Heart of Darkness is set right after the, the period of the late nineteenth century when imperial powers sliced up and doled out Africa like some particularly delicious—and ivory-rich—birthday cake. None of the Western countries really come off looking good in this whole debacle, but Belgium, unfortunately, looks particularly bad. They were after the valuable ivory hidden away in the African Interior, and they weren't afraid to brutalize and oppress the Africans in order to get it.

You either have to wait for them to finish or you can spend city cash to circumvent the waiting period.Or, you can do it for free by setting the time ahead on your phone or tablet, whichever device you use to play the game. Big business deluxe tips. Set it ahead by however long it takes to complete the longest job or construction project that you have going, then go back to the game and collect all of your goods. Read on for some tips and tricks for Big Business Deluxe!There’s a lot to do that doesn’t take a whole lot of time to complete in this game, but there are plenty of jobs, especially later on, that take forever to complete, such as more expensive construction jobs, and lucrative contracts at heavily-updated industrial buildings.

Heart of Darkness follows the disturbing journey of English ivory-trading agent Marlow, who, working for a Belgian company, travels into the jungles of Africa in search of a mysterious man named Kurtz who appears to have (1) become a god-like figure, and (2) gone totally off his rocker.But Heart of Darkness is much, much more than a story about a trip up the river. It's a searching exploration of difference: of good and evil, black and white, sanity and insanity. In the end, what we're left with is nothing.Really.Most contemporary critics agree that the novel is about the essential emptiness at the core of humanity—and language. That's why T.

Eliot used a quotation from the novel as an epigraph to his poem ',' a super important and famous literary exploration of modern life.One last and important thing: in 1975, Nigerian writer spoke out against the novel. He accused it of making its point by dehumanizing Africans and reducing them to extensions of the hostile and primal jungle environment. Conrad's language was beautiful and seductive, he said—but it was wrong. Beautiful, seductive, and wrong.

To us, that sounds a lot like how Marlow would describe Kurtz—and it's a good example of how head-twistingly complex this novel is.Get comfy. This is going to take a while. What is Heart of Darkness About and Why Should I Care? Debaters Gonna Debate, Debate, DebateFor a simple—or is that complex?—reason: Heart of Darkness continues to generate some seriously heated debate even today.And we're not talking about the kind of squabbling that English PhD candidates engage in—the kind that includes obscure citations and footnotes. We're not talking about the arguments that arises in undergraduate survey courses. We're not even talking about the raised voices in an English Lit classroom in high school.We're talking about something way bigger. After all, this single book has influences artists as important as William Golding, Orson Welles,.

Conrad's work has some staying power—including the power to get people to argue passionately.And we're going to hand the mic over to the good people at The Guardian so they can explain:Heart of Darkness is probably the title that has aroused, and continues to arouse, most literary critical debate, not to say polemic. This is partly because the story it tells has the visceral simplicity of great myth, and also because the book takes its narrator (Charles Marlow), and the reader, on a journey into the heart of Africa. Let's talk about these seemingly disparate reasons for the kerfuffle that surrounds Heart of Darkness about a hundred and twenty years after it was published: it a) seems like a myth and b) it takes place in Africa. For, the fact that 'myth' and 'Africa' go hand in hand in Conrad's work is a problem. A huge, racist problem. Achebe's 'An Image Of Africa' Vs. Horrible First Person NarratorsLet's let him explain:Heart of Darkness has Africa as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor.

Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril. Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind? But that is not even the point. The real question is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans which this age-long attitude has fostered and continues to foster in the world. Basically, Achebe's arguing that the fact that Heart of Darkness uses Africa as a semi-mythical place is exactly the problem. By mythologizing Africa, Africa is portrayed as this big, bad Other that white Europeans get lost within. By using the structure of a myth or fairy tale (Marlow's journey down the Congo is a little bit like Red Ridinghood going to Grandma's) Conrad is legitimizing the idea of Africa as mythological.

And that's racist as all get-out.Because this is a debate, though, there's another side: the side of people that argue that this Africa-as-myth nonsense isn't Conrad speaking, but Marlow. Marlow isn't getting any gold medals for heroism or even truth-telling—he's a flawed character, with a flawed view of the world. There are tons of other first-person narrators that believe and do terrible things—think of,. We don't take the character of Mersault as proof that Camus believes that killing is a-okay, or the character of Humbert Humbert as proof that Nabokov thought molesting kids was fine. Praise-Worthy: Yay or Nay?And then there's this big question: does Heart of Darkness deserve literary praise.even if it is racist? Achebe has some thoughts on that matter:And the question is whether a novel which celebrates thisdehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can becalled a great work of art. My answer is: No, it cannot.

But of course—because of the whole Heart-of-Darkness-stirring-the-debate-pot we talked about, other people have competing views:However, despite Achebe's compelling 'evidence', I am still finding it difficult to dismiss this man and his short novel. Are we to throw all racists out of the canon? Are we, as Achebe suggests, to ignore the period in which novels are written and demand that the artist rise above the prejudices of his times? The debate rages on. Believe us when we say this: every point in the Heart of Darkness debate has a counter-point, and a point to counter that counterpoint.We can't give you any easy answers here—you'll have to join the debate yourself and take a stand.

Heart of Darkness Resources AudiosNPR interviews Nigerian author Chinua Achebe on Heart of Darkness, which he considers 'inappropriate' because of its depiction of Africans.Gather the family around the radio and listen to Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre perform Conrad's story. DocumentsThe Wasteland by T.S.

Eliot, a poem inspired by Heart of Darkness.The Conradian talks about Conrad and his roots in Eastern Europe.T. Eliot's 'The Hollow Men' uses an epigraph from Heart of Darkness. Can you figure out why? WebsitesFor only £500, you, too, can be a member of the Joseph Conrad Society. Spend all your allowance? The site still has some good information, including a 'Student Resources' section.

Movie and TV AdaptationsJust another reason the '50s were so cool: Playhouse 90 presented 1.5-hour dramas, like this 'Heart of Darkness' (episode #7).Apocalypse Now (1979), directed by Francis Ford Coppola, updates Heart of Darkness to the Vietnam War. It's also pretty much the best adaptation in the history of adaptations.Heart of Darkness (1993) with John Malkovich as Kurtz.

Unfortunately, it's not as good as you'd hope.This 1999 documentary, Search for Kurtz, is the story of Tony Po, the alleged inspiration for Marlon Brando's Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. Confused?King Kong, directed by Peter Jackson, has many references to Heart of Darkness. We're also worried it's a little bit racist.

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VideosScreenwriter John Milius says smart things about Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness.It doesn't get any more classic than this, Shmoopers.Trailer from the 1979 film Apocalypse Now. AudioJohn Powell's 'Rhapsodie Negre' was inspired by Heart of Darkness. You can also learn more about John Powell. (What that bio doesn't say, however, is that he was a flat-out racist jerk.) ImagesThis is a map of the Congo from the early 1900s, just after Heart of Darkness.

See all the different colors?An Oxford World Classics book cover. Anyone want to try a close reading of the cover?A photo of Joseph Conrad sporting some seriously hip facial hair.