1. The novel opens up with a captain aboard a ship. He is new to this ship and the staff and is unsure that they completely trust him yet. One night he is alone on the deck and sees a figure in the water. The figure turns out to be a tired , naked man, who he helps board the ship. After some conversation the captain finds out that the man escaped his previous ship because he had killed a man there. The captain somehow felt connected and related to this strange man and helped him. He let him secretly stay on the ship for awhile, and even hid him when the man’s previous captain came looking for the fugitive. However, the man couldn’t stay hidden on the ship forever, so they conceived a plan and he jumped off and left.
The next half of the story jumps to another scene were there are a few men aboard a boat having a conversation in the night. Then one of the men, Marlow, goes off on a long story, which makes up almost the rest of the novel.
His story is about his time working in Africa. It begins with him aboard a ship traveling up the Congo river. Throughout his journey he sees the horrible brutality that the white workers show towards the natives that they have forced to work for them. Many of the natives die from being beat or overworked and malnourished, however white officials are living luxuriously in the jungle. Marlow eventually arrives to the Central Station where he finds his potential ship has sunk, so he spends months there waiting for repair to be done. In his time there, he hears more about Kurtz, a man who is looked upon as an essential part of the company. Eventually the ship is fixed and he and a few workers head up the river into the even more dense jungle. On this journey the ship is attacked by natives, but the survivors venture on and finally arrive at Kurtz’s Inner Station. They find Kurtz extremely ill and hear his stories of how he has tricked the natives into believing he is a god and then gone on raids in search of ivory. Kurtz’s assistant confides in Marlow that Kurtz was behind the native attack on their ship, he had hoped that it would scare them away and that they would leave him to continue his plans. They still get Kurtz to board the trip, but he dies on the way back. Until his death he went on about killing all Africans and his last words were “The horror-the horror”. The story ends with Marlow meeting Kurtz’s mourning fiancee and him lying to not shatter her perfect picture of Kurtz. This story fulfills Conrad’s purpose of exposing the cruelties of Europe’s rule over Africa, through countless examples of blunt brutality.
2. The main theme of the novel is the cruelty of imperialism. Over and over again Marlow observes the Company’s workers living a life of ease, only by exploiting the native population. The different types of cruelty are juxtaposed between Kurtz and the Company’s other workers. Kurtz is open about his brutality and cruel tactics to get ivory from the natives. However, the typical workers justify their work as trade and their cruel practices as helping the natives away from their savage ways.
3. Joseph Conrad has an ambivalent tone throughout the story. Although Marlow recognizes all of these acts as cruel, he does nothing to change them and justifies them as understandable.
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