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Heart of Darkness Audiobook
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Heart of Darkness is a novella written by Joseph Conrad. It is widely regarded as a significant work of English literature and part of the Western canon. The story tells of Charles Marlow, an Englishman who took a foreign assignment from a Belgian trading company as a ferry-boat captain in Africa. Heart of Darkness exposes the myth behind colonization while exploring the three levels of darkness that the protagonist, Marlow, encounters--the darkness of the Congo wilderness, the darkness of the European's cruel treatment of the natives, and the unfathomable darkness within every human being for committing heinous acts of evil. Although Conrad does not give the name of the river, at the time of writing the Congo Free State, the location of the large and important Congo River, was a private colony of Belgium's King Leopold II. Marlow is employed to transport ivory downriver. However, his more pressing assignment is to return Kurtz, another ivory trader, to civilization, in a cover-up. Kurtz has a reputation throughout the region. This symbolic story is a story within a story or frame narrative. It follows Marlow as he recounts from dusk through to late night, to a group of men aboard a ship anchored in the Thames Estuary his Congolese adventure. The passage of time and the darkening sky during the fictitious narrative-within-the-narrative parallel the atmosphere of the story.
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“Heart of Darkness has had an influence that goes beyond the specifically literary. This parable of a man’s ‘heart of darkness’ dramatized in the alleged ‘Dark Continent’ of Africa transcended its late Victorian era to acquire the stature of one of the great, if troubling, visionary works of western civilization.”
— Joyce Carol Oates
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“Once experienced, it is hard to let Heart of Darkness go. A masterpiece of surprise, of expression, and psychological nuance, of fury at colonial expansion and of how men make the least of life, the novella is like a poem, endlessly readable and worthy of rereading.”
— Telegraph (London) -
“One of literature’s most somber fictions. It explores fundamental questions about man’s nature: his capacity for evil; the necessity for restraint; the effect of physical darkness and isolation on a civilized soul; and the necessity of relinquishing pride for one’s own spiritual salvation.”
— Masterpieces of World Literature -
“Born to Polish parents in what is now known as the Ukraine, Joseph Conrad would become one of the greatest writers in the English language…He not only solidified his place in the panethon of great novelists, but also established himself as a keen-eyed chronicler of the social and political themes that animated the contemporary world around him.”
— John G. Peters, author of Conrad and Impressionism
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About Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad (Józef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski) (1857–1924) was born in Ukraine. Raised by an uncle after the death of his parents, he educated himself by reading widely in Polish and French. At age twenty-one he began a long career sailing the seas on French merchant vessels, after which he went to London and began writing, using the romance and adventure of his own life for his incomparable sea novels.