Heart of Darkness

“We live as we dream--alone....” --- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness “I don't like work--no man does--but I like what is in the work--the chance to find yourself. Your own reality--for yourself not for others--what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.” --- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness “... it was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.” --- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness Heart of Darkness is a novella (published in 1902) by Joseph Conrad. Before publication, it appeared in a three-part series in Blackwood's Magazine (1899). This highly symbolic story is actually a story within a story, or frame tale, following a man named Charlie Marlow as he recounts his adventure to a group of men on a ship at dusk and continuing into the evening. It details an incident earlier in Marlow's life, a journey on what readers can assume is the Congo River (although the name of the country Marlow is visiting is never specified in the text) to investigate the work of Kurtz, a Belgian ivory trader in the Congo Free State.