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Joseph Conrad’s “The Heart of Darkness” is a tale related by Marlowe, a mature seaman, to a group of four others, including the book’s narrator. It is about Marlowe’s adventure over the Congo River into the heart of Africa to pick up the sickened African trader Kurtz.

The trip took place during the rise of Europe’s 19th Century period of imperialism and colonialism over Africa. During the 1880s, European countries had cut up the Africa continent into colonies under their individual spheres of control. Conrad had led an expedition over the Congo River in 1890. He had been appalled by what he had experienced.

Belgium’s King Leopold had taken over that part of interior Africa that would be called the Belgian Congo. Through Marlowe, Joseph Conrad writes of the depravity and greed under which the colonial imperialists — the English, French, Germans and especially Leopold — slaughtered and killed millions of so-called heathen Africans to obtain the riches of ivory and rubber.

Marlowe uses irony as recounted by the book’s narrator reporting his tale. The irony is based on symbolism contrasting darkness and lightness and the inner and outer aspects of the appearance of things and human consciousness. Conrad rose as a psychological writer gifted with revealing the contrasting forces that tear apart the human soul.

The basic contrast was the guise of providing humanitarian and spiritual help to the Africans and the actual full scale killing of millions of them by the colonial traders during this period before World War I. Early in the tale, Marlowe reveals respect for the glorious advances made by the early boatmen and explorers while he enters his tale describing the inhuman brutality of their forces as they took over African lands with their naval gunships, explosives and rifles, all for sheer profit. It was a period of an African Holocaust.

The plot concerns Marlowe’s thoughts on who is the master trader Kurtz he has come to retrieve and what does he represent. While the story’s description lies upon a background of cruelty of the white imperialists, Marlow begins to realize he can only have conflicting feelings about the reality of the man. Kurtz is either a truly evil man – there are the heads of Africans placed on posts about his compound – or he represents something more conflicted deeply inside the souls of the colonial imperialists.

Kurtz had written that among the African natives, whites must be regarded as supernatural beings. He had made himself a god among them. Kurtz concludes, however, in strict contrast, that the Africans must be exterminated. Marlowe’s moral dilemma concerns how to describe Kurtz’s actions.

A weakened Kurtz dies on the return voyage. Marlowe had made up his mind to not reveal all he had seen except, importantly, to those listening to his tale and to defend Kurtz’s reputation before Kurtz’s fiancé and the audience of imperialists. The essential questions of the story remain with Kurtz’s final words: “The horror! The horror!”