Story Skeleton—Heart of Darkness

Story structure relates to the psychological appeal of narrative, that which engages readers and builds in them a sense of anticipation—a desire to know what happens next. This blog series is meant to demonstrate the universality of story structure with plot breakdowns of award-winning and classic novels.

By Michelle Barker 

The Scramble for Africa

Heart of Darkness is an 1899 novella written by the Polish-British author Joseph Conrad. It’s a fascinating exploration not only of European colonialism in Africa (the Scramble for Africa, it was called) but also a wonderful illustration of how authors can use both concepts and imagery in a way that implies their opposite: tackling darkness by bringing the (supposed) light of civilization. 

Not only was Conrad born in a country that has repeatedly been carved up by other nations (Poland), but he also traveled to the Congo as a young man, serving on one of the Belgian trading company’s steamers much like the protagonist, Charlie Marlow. 

While many have argued about who the prototype for Kurtz—the corrupted ivory trader Marlow seeks—might have been, no one can refute the brutality of what happened in Africa when the Europeans arrived. This is a shocking book that forces readers, settlers in particular, to do some serious thinking about the nature of civilization: “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only… something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to.” 

And of course, what Conrad really means is that it is irredeemable. There is no higher ideal in operation here. Kurtz, the man who “enlarges people’s minds” sets himself up as a god to be worshipped; what starts as a humanitarian endeavor ends as a self-aggrandizing disaster. 

This book operates almost entirely on irony. Marlow begins by contrasting colonists with conquerors, but in the story he goes on to tell, there’s no doubt that the colonists behave like conquerors—their strength comes from the subjugation of others. They grab what they can, simply because it’s there and they’ve got the bigger guns: “It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind—as is very proper for those who tackle darkness.” 

It’s the light that brings the horror to the Congo: European colonialism. The heart of darkness is not at the center of Africa at all. It’s within us. 

Narrative goal

Heart of Darkness is written as a traditional seaman’s yarn. Five men are on board the Nellie, a boat on the Thames, waiting for the tide to turn—the captain, plus four others, only one of whom is named: the lawyer, the accountant, the narrator, and Marlow. They have to pass the time somehow, so Marlow decides to tell them his story. 

While the narrator’s voice bookends the novella, the story itself belongs to Marlow, making this a framed narrative. Conrad keeps the voice conversational as he shows Marlow’s slow but steady realization of the truth that he encounters in the Congo. Here again, the use of light and darkness is skillfully employed. Marlow’s eyes are slowly opened—as are ours. This is a journey from innocence to experience for both Marlow and the reader. 

Using the oral tradition creates a nice echo of storytelling cultures, another in a series of ironies. But that’s not the only reason Conrad has chosen it. The narrator’s opinions about London’s exalted place in the world and humanity’s right to assert dominion over nature are about to be challenged. Because regardless of what they claimed, the Belgian trading company was not about bringing light (progress) to the dark (uncivilized) places of the world. They were after ivory. 

However, it is also worth considering that Marlow might be an unreliable narrator. After all, he’s the only one who comes out of this story looking somewhat decent. It forces readers to question how much of what he tells us is what really happened and how much he has spun to make himself look good. It also allows Conrad to place distance between himself and his narrator so that the reader doesn’t confuse Marlow’s views with the author’s. 

On the surface, Marlow’s story is quite simple. He accepts a job to travel along the Congo River, first to retrieve the bones of his predecessor but eventually to fetch a renowned ivory trader named Kurtz and bring him home. But the farther he travels into the “heart of darkness,” the more he hears stories and rumors about Kurtz. The whole novella soon centers on the character of Kurtz whom the reader doesn’t meet until near the end. 

Kurtz has apparently gone to the Congo to bring the light of European civilization to the dark heart of Africa, though he is incidentally also the best agent the company has ever had—“best” being measured by how much ivory he brings in. Over time, whatever civilization he brings breaks down into egomania and savagery (his). On the journey to find Kurtz, Marlow becomes obsessed with him. What began as a desire for adventure turns into a battle for Marlow to hold onto his moral compass. He must retrieve Kurtz while also coming to terms with both the corrupting force of power and the realities of colonialism.

PLOT POINTS

Structurally, Marlow’s story follows Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey. When we bring in some of the typical archetypes associated with the hero’s journey, it illuminates Marlow’s relationship with Kurtz in a way that makes more sense than the traditional protagonist/antagonist dichotomy. 

The frame story sets up the hero’s journey: five men are on a boat on the Thames waiting for the tide to turn. When the narrator makes a statement about the great civilized city of London, Marlow watches the sun set and imagines what the Romans must have thought when they first arrived here to bring civilization to this part of the world. As darkness settles on the river, he says, “This also has been one of the dark places of the earth.” He then proceeds to show us how.

Departure (Act One)

In the first part of the hero’s journey, the hero receives a call to adventure, leaves their home and embarks on a quest. 

After extensive travel, Marlow, a ship’s captain, has returned to London—a pinnacle of European civilization and colonial ambition—and decides to pursue his lifelong desire to explore Africa. When he realizes there is a company that trades on the Congo River, he finds a job with them piloting a steamboat. This is his call to adventure, the catalyst that will take him away from his familiar world and into the unknown. The actual inciting incident will come later. 

(It's worth mentioning here that while the catalyst and inciting incident are often interchangeable structural terms, this is not always the case. Sometimes, like here, the catalyst gets the story moving and sends the protagonist in a new direction, but their true quest—which crystallizes in the inciting incident—doesn’t materialize until later.) 

Hero’s journey stories often also include a refusal of the call. After saying goodbye to his aunt, Marlow expresses a sudden reluctance to undertake the journey, a moment “I won’t say of hesitation but of startled pause … as though, instead of going to the centre of a continent, I were about to set off for the centre of the earth.” 

But it’s only a moment, and off he goes on a French steamer sailing along the African coastline to the Company’s first station. It is here where he can truly be said to cross the threshold into the new world. This is where he first sees people chained to each other: criminals, supposedly—though they look a lot like slaves. He also sees holes being dug for no reason, smashed drainpipes, and a railway that isn’t getting built. It is his first snapshot of the lie of civilization and progress. 

His initial task is to retrieve the body of a steamer captain (the one he’s replacing) who was killed in an argument with the natives over some hens. At the station, he meets the Company’s chief accountant, a mentor of sorts. This is the first person to mention Mr. Kurtz to Marlow—a “remarkable” person and “first-class agent” who sends in as much ivory as all the other agents put together. At that point, Marlow sets off on a two-hundred-mile trek to the central station to fetch his steamer. But the task of picking up Kurtz has not yet been broached.

Initiation (Act Two)

This section of the hero’s journey usually spans everything from rising action to the midpoint and climax of the story that we’d see in a traditional three-act structure. It begins with tests, allies, and enemies. 

Marlow’s first test occurs when he discovers that the boat he was supposed to pilot is sitting at the bottom of the river and will need to be pulled out and repaired. He meets the Manager, an ordinary looking man who embodies Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil. There’s nothing remarkable about him other than that he has the stomach for this place (most who come there do not). At first it’s hard to say if the Manager is an ally, mentor, or enemy, but irony is at work here as well. He should be an ally and mentor, but as a Company man he symbolizes everything that is terrible about colonialism: the exploitation, greed, and indifference to human suffering. 

It's the Manager who gives Marlow his quest and enlists him in going to fetch Kurtz (this is an unusually late inciting incident, but here it is at last). That is apparently how the boat was wrecked in the first place: Kurtz has become very ill, and the Manager took it out in a hurry and hit some rocks. 

Over the months it takes Marlow to repair the boat, he meets the Brickmaker, though he never sees him make any bricks. And he hears lots more about Kurtz. When the boat is finally ready, he heads up the river with the manager and a group of cannibals—which seems like an odd choice for shipmates until one realizes that the cannibals have more humanity than the Manager. 

Marlow explores a hut on the riverbank that contains a woodpile with a sign in English saying that the wood is for him and that he should hurry. In the hut he finds an English book—a strange test. 

Fog on the river delays them. When it rises and they proceed to a narrower part of the channel, hostile natives attack them with arrows and the helmsman is killed. There is a sense that Marlow is traveling into a surreal world, though he starts to think Kurtz must be dead and regrets that he won’t get the chance to meet him. 

After two months they reach Kurtz’s trading station which represents the inmost cave, the deepest point of darkness. Marlow meets the Russian, an agent with the Dutch trading company who’s been on the river for two years. He’s the one who left them the wood. He says the locals attacked them because they were afraid Marlow was coming to take Kurtz away (which he is). 

The trading station is surrounded by stakes topped with round orbs that Marlow soon realizes are heads—the heads of rebels, according to Kurtz. He finds out that the tribe Kurtz is living with treats him like a god. Things are not good here. Kurtz has clearly become unstable. 

When the Manager and other men return with Kurtz, he’s on a makeshift stretcher and is very ill. During the supreme ordeal (the climax in three-act structure), Marlow finally meets him face to face. In the middle of the night, Kurtz makes his escape on all fours. Marlow tracks him down, though they are now near a native camp. One word from Kurtz and Marlow could be killed. 

In a seizing the sword moment (the moment of transformation), Marlow stares into his Shadow self and realizes that whatever is inside Kurtz is also in him—that all humans are capable of both evil and goodness in equal measure, and that to judge someone by any other standards is to fall prey to hypocrisy.

Return (Act Three)

The Return is essentially an extended version of three-act structure’s resolution. In this last section of the hero’s journey, the hero returns home bringing something that will help the community, thanks to the experiences they had and the wisdom they gained. 

The road back along the river toward civilization is twice as fast, though the life is also ebbing from Kurtz, and Marlow himself is becoming ill. Kurtz entrusts Marlow with his papers, suggesting that Marlow is an heir in some way to his legacy. Marlow is the only one present to hear Kurtz’s last words: “The horror, the horror.” 

Entire PhD’s have no doubt been written about that moment. What does it mean? Conrad doesn’t tell us. There have been so many surreal and even absurd moments on this journey that he might be suggesting this whole money grab disguised as humanitarianism is also absurd—and intrinsically horrific. But I think it also means that no one can exempt themselves from the possibility of moral depravity. We are each of us capable of anything. 

In any case, Marlow is so ill, he nearly dies himself. His resurrection in Brussels is both physical and spiritual. He returns with a new understanding of the human condition (and his own soul), as well as the dangers of unchecked power. But he also protects Kurtz’s widow from the darkness he has glimpsed. She is still blinded by her admiration of the man. When she asks about Kurtz’s last words, Marlow lies and says Kurtz spoke her name. 

We return to the framing device, where the men have been sitting on the Nellie listening to Marlow’s story. This is the elixir that he has returned with—he has recounted his experiences to them. The original narrator now stares toward London, which appears to be at “the heart of an immense darkness.” The reversal that Marlow insisted upon at the beginning has now been achieved. The narrator realizes that his assumptions about colonialism have been misguided. The hero’s journey is complete.

The archetypes

Rather than thinking of Kurtz as an antagonist—because he isn’t exactly working against Marlow—it is more helpful to think of him as Marlow’s Shadow. In a story that is built on the imagery of light and darkness, he is Marlow’s opposite. He embodies the impulses Marlow must fight against within himself. 

Marlow arrives in the Congo expecting to see colonialism as it has been billed: the bringer of progress and civilization. What he discovers is a place where the French shoot blindly into the jungle, the brickmaker doesn’t make bricks, Marlow’s steamer ship sits at the bottom of the river, and holes are dug for no reason. At the center of this fiasco is Kurtz, the one everyone thinks of as a god. The one who sees himself as a “supernatural being” deserving of worship, who is seen as a great humanitarian and yet recommends at the end of his report on the “suppression of savage customs” to “exterminate all the brutes.” He arrives in Africa as a force of light but finishes as a source of darkness. Marlow must fight against being drawn into this vortex. 

The Africans themselves are the Shapeshifters in this story. When Marlow first sees them in chains, he thinks they are criminals. They’ve been described to him as enemies. Then he sees the starving and diseased mine workers—neither criminals nor enemies. In both cases, they appear more like slaves. When at last Marlow encounters the heads on stakes at Kurtz’s house—supposedly the heads of rebels—he says, “What would be the next definition I was to hear? There had been enemies, criminals, workers—and these were rebels.” No one calls them what they really are: the victims of uncontrolled greed. 

There are various Allies in the book, people from the trading company who are ostensibly on Marlow’s side to help him in his quest to track down Kurtz, though none of them really behave as allies. The General Manager seems sketchy and makes everyone uneasy. The Russian Trader is unbalanced in his fervent devotion to Kurtz. His patched, jester-like clothing almost suggest a Trickster figure, but he is more fool than wise man.

The power of foreshadowing

Heart of Darkness is a masterclass in how to prepare an audience for a character who doesn’t appear until near the end. Conrad allows other characters to mention Kurtz—over and over. He is controversial. The best agent ever. He is ill. He’s a demigod. One must listen to him. One must meet him. He is eloquent. He is evil. He embodies the rapacious greed of Europe. 

In fact, Kurtz seems to be whatever others want him to be. Later, Marlow is surprised to discover Kurtz is a talented musician—or was, before he lost his way. His widow seems utterly bewitched by his capacity for goodness. The one thing he is not is someone we can ignore. 

By the time we finally meet Kurtz in person, we have been prepared. This is a man who has people bowing down to him; a man who mounts the heads of those who don’t agree with him on stakes and sets them around his home where he can see them. Even though he is sick and dying by the time Marlow encounters him, he still has the strength of will to crawl into the jungle to prevent Marlow from taking him home. 

Danger in general is foreshadowed by Conrad’s keen attention to detail. The river is referred to repeatedly as a snake. Fog creates a feeling of both claustrophobia and unseen threat; the jungle thickens, and there are eyes in the bushes. The river narrows, and the steamer chugs on, deeper into the heart of darkness. And everything leads to Kurtz. 

There’s also a scene early in the novella that seems innocent but is full of menace. Before Marlow leaves on his journey, he must be seen by a doctor who wants to measure his head and asks if madness runs in the family. He sees everyone who leaves for Africa, but he never sees them when they come back. If they come back.

Why is Heart of Darkness a classic?

According to the literary critic Harold Bloom, Heart of Darkness is the most frequently analyzed work of literature in universities and colleges, probably because Conrad doesn’t spell things out for his readers. He leaves the door so wide open for interpretation that it makes the book quite inhospitable to the reader. It’s hard to get into and hard to push through. 

It’s worth remembering that this novella came out in 1899 as a serial and 1902 in book form. Conrad’s view of Western progress would have been unpopular—and indeed the novella was not a huge success. He was one of the first to question the notion that Europeans had cornered the market on civilization and progress, and to condemn colonialism. 

The novella has been lambasted by authors like Chinua Achebe for being racist and promoting a prejudiced and dehumanized view of Africa. This is undeniably true. At one point, Marlow even suggests the Africans have a hint of tails. Africa is portrayed as uncivilized and populated by people who are less than human. But is this Conrad’s view, or Marlow’s? One can presume Conrad chose a frame narrative for a reason—perhaps for this very reason: so that readers do not conflate his opinion with that of Marlow’s (i.e. the prevailing worldview). 

Certainly, Conrad could have criticized colonialism in a way that didn’t also promote both racism and harmful stereotypes. It would be an interesting exercise to consider how the book would be different if he’d done that. But maybe, given the time and place, European views were not sufficiently advanced for him to write that kind of book. It lands with more of a tone-deaf thump now, but it also forces the reader to engage with difficult subject matter and consider how much has changed—and how much still remains to be done. 

Despite the book’s limitations, Conrad took a brave stand against colonialism and the flow of so-called progress and said what few others were willing to say. In the end, he seems to cast a vote for the cleansing power of nature. While the Europeans with their “imbecile rapacity” seem to be praying to ivory, “outside, the silent wilderness … struck me as something great and invincible … waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion.” 

Conrad grasped something essential about the nature and stupidity of human greed that is sadly still relevant today.

Michelle Barker is an award-winning author and poet. Her most recent publication, co-authored with David Brown, is Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling. Her fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have appeared in literary reviews worldwide. She has published three YA novels (one fantasy and two historical fiction), a historical picture book, and a chapbook of poetry. Michelle holds a BA in English literature (UBC) and an MFA in creative writing (UBC). Many of the writers she’s worked with have gone on to win publishing contracts and honours for their work. Michelle lives and writes in Vancouver, Canada.