Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, as he was christened, was born in 1857 in the territory of Poland partitioned and occupied since 1795 by Russia, Prussia and Austria. Conrad's family was forced into exile in Russia. For Conrad, then, exile and loneliness were almost inborn. After his parents' deaths, Conrad was brought up by an uncle. In 1874 he left for Marseilles to go to sea. For four years he sailed on French merchant ships, training as a mariner. In 1878 he joined an English ship and in the following years he sailed to the Far East and Australia. Learning English was required for his Master Mariner qualification, which he achieved in 1886, the same year in which he became a British subject. In 1890 Conrad received a commission which took him to Africa. This journey is recorded in his work The Congo Diary, which bears witness to his direct experience of the brutalities of colonial exploitation. A modest inheritance he received from his uncle encouraged him to abandon the sea and devote himself to writing.
His aim was to explore the meaning of the human condition . He set his novels and short stories at sea or in exotic latitudes because these were the places he knew well, and they enabled him to isolate his characters so that their problems and inner conflicts stood out with particular force. Conrad's stories deal with extreme situations and often with violence and mystery. Conrad's heroes are all solitary figures, rooted in no past, committed to an uncertain future. In general they are viewed externally, through the mind of others or through their actions. Conrad experimented continually; his style is not straightforward but 'oblique. He found chronological sequence inadequate, so he broke the normal time sequence and preferred time shifts. He used various narrative techniques: first person narration, an invisible narrator, journals and letters. Many of his novels and short stories are told by the same narrator, Marlow, or have more than one narrator. The use of everal points of view results from Conrad's wish to break free from the constraints of an omniscient narrator so that the reader is left to decide for himself, and in order to show the relativism of moral values. Conrad's native tongue was Polish and his second language was French. However, he wrote in English because he thought that it offered him the ideal expression for his complex vision of life. The fluid form' of his novels reflects the complexity of man's consciousness. The dialogue is idiomatic, characterised by question and exclamation marks, by dashes and interjections.
The novel consists of three parts. Marlow, a sailor, together with the passengers of the Nellie, is waiting for the tide which will let the ship sail from London. He talks about his first commission for a Belgian company involved in the ivory trade in the Congo. His task was to carry raw ivory from the heart of the continent to the coast, where it could be loaded on ships bound for Europe. Once in Africa, while he was proceeding down the coast, he encountered a French gun-boat firing into the jungle, though, apparently, there was no enemy. He then got to the Company Station near the coast, where he was disappointed by the inefficiency and neglect of the organisation and by the cruelty of the colonial exploitation. It was there that he heard Kurtz's name for the first time. Kurtz was a Company agent who managed to supply more ivory than the other agents and had become a sort of idol for the natives. An expedition was arranged to reach Kurtz and bring him back to civilisation, since he was seriously ill. During the voyage, Marlow met several people who referred to Kurtz as a very remarkable person, 'an emissary of pity, and science, and progress. Marlow found out that Kurtz had even been required by the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs to write a report. There he put down the noble ideals that had initially brought him to Africa, but he ended it with the postscript: 'Exterminate all the brutes! Marlow finally met Kurtz and succeeded in taking him on board. However, before he could interrogate him about the 'unspeakable rites' he had taken part in, Kurtz died whispering the ambiguous words: "The horror! The horror!'. When Marlow returned to Belgium, he called on Kurtz's fiancée and instead of telling her the truth about what had happened, he told her that Kurtz had uttered her name while dying.
The novel is-set at the end of the 19th century at an unspecified date. It begins on the River Thames outside London but most of the action takes place in the Congo region. King Leopold II of Belgium claimed the area and regarded the Congo Free State as a personal territorial possession. He stated that the agents of the State had to accomplish the noble mission of continuing the development of civilisation in Africa, gradually reducing the primitive barbarism and fighting sanguinary customs. They also had to accustom the population to general rules. Kurtz went to Africa to manage the Congo's most productive ivory station. He was a progressive and a liberal. However, it was perhaps because he went into the jungle without properly knowing himself that the wilderness captured him, and his misguided conduct took him beyond the limits of his heart. The price he paid for that was madness and death. On the contrary, Marlow did not transgress This limits and came back without fully understanding his experience. Even though the heart of darkness tried to exercise its influence on him too, he was able to restrain himself thanks to his work ethic.