A short, dark river story summarised as three stops, with our own counts of dark, ivory, rivets and the horror by part.
A short, dense novella told by one man in the dark: sharp on the greed of a trading company, hard going in its sentences, and troubling in how it treats African people. Free on Project Gutenberg. Four out of five (draft opinion).
Every guide comes as a video and a full written article. Pick the one you need: the review is spoiler-free, the ending explained is not.
Heart of Darkness summary, stop by stop up the river: the Company's station, the Central Station and Kurtz, with our own counts of darkness, ivory, rivets and the horror by part. Full spoilers.
Heart of Darkness is Joseph Conrad’s novella about a sailor, Marlow, who tells four men on a boat in the Thames how he steamed up an African river to find a Company ivory agent named Kurtz. We use the free Project Gutenberg text, ebook #219, which has three parts.
Content note: the book contains racist language and dehumanising description of African people, and some violence. Below is a summary built as three stops up the river, with our own counts of dark, ivory, rivets and the horror by part. Full spoilers throughout.
A short, dense novella told by one man in the dark: sharp on the greed of a trading company, hard going in its sentences, and troubling in how it treats African people. Free on Project Gutenberg. Four out of five (draft opinion). Read it if: you want the plot, stop by stop, with counts from the text; you like short classics with layered narrators; you will read it alongside the criticism, such as achebe's essay. Skip it if: dense victorian sentences wear you out and you will not use notes; racist language and dehumanising description are a hard line for you; you want a fast adventure: much of it is reflection.
Heart of Darkness summary, stop by stop up the river: the Company's station, the Central Station and Kurtz, with our own counts of darkness, ivory, rivets and the horror by part. Full spoilers. Summary: Heart of Darkness →
A sailor named Marlow tells four men on a boat in the Thames how he went up a great river in Africa as a steamboat captain for a trading Company, to find its ivory agent Kurtz. Kurtz dies on the way back, whispering the horror, and Marlow later tells Kurtz's fiancee, the Intended, that his last word was her name.
The text never explains it. Kurtz cries out the horror twice as he dies, and Marlow calls it a summing up that had candour and conviction. Our count finds the word horror eight times in the whole text, seven of them in part three. Any reading of what it means, including ours, is an opinion.
In the Project Gutenberg text (ebook #219) the three parts total about 39,171 words by our count, excluding the Gutenberg header and footer and the part headings: part one 14,684, part two 12,456, part three 12,031.
By our count the phrase heart of darkness appears exactly twice, once in part two and once in part three, both times describing the river. The words dark and darkness together appear fifty times, twenty-five of them in part three.
An ivory agent of the Company at the Inner Station, far up the river. His name first appears about 8,100 words in, from the Company's chief accountant, and it appears 121 times in all: 21 in part one, 35 in part two, 65 in part three.
The novella contains racist language, and it gives African people little speech. In a lecture in 1975, later titled An Image of Africa, the writer Chinua Achebe argued that Conrad was a racist and that the book denies Africans their full humanity (reported by several outlets). Our summary leaves every slur out.
The Project Gutenberg text, ebook number 219, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, in three parts. Every count and chapter reference on this page follows that text.
