97 Fun Facts About Heart of Darkness

The author of Heart of Darkness learned English only in his twenties; what was his first language?

Polish: he was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski and spoke French from childhood too. English came third, picked up as a merchant seaman, and he kept a strong foreign accent all his life.

Whose poem 'The White Man's Burden' appeared in 1899, like Heart of Darkness?

Rudyard Kipling's poem urged the United States to take up colonial rule in the Philippines as a duty. Conrad's story of what such rule looked like up close began its magazine run the same year.

In Heart of Darkness, which relative pulls strings to get Marlow his job with the Company?

His aunt, who knows the wife of a high Company official. She sees him as 'an emissary of light' sent to wean ignorant millions from their horrid ways; he hints that the Company is run for profit.

In Heart of Darkness, what are the two women outside the Company's office doing as Marlow goes in to sign on?

Knitting black wool, like the Fates spinning thread. Marlow later salutes them in his mind with the gladiators' farewell, since few of the men they show in ever return.

In Heart of Darkness, which commodity does the Company's trade revolve around?

Ivory: at the Central Station, Marlow says, the word 'rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed', as if men prayed to it. Kurtz matters because he sends in as much as all the other agents together.

In Heart of Darkness, Marlow marvels at the restraint of his hungry boat crew, who are what?

Cannibals: they outnumber the whites thirty to five and are paid in bits of brass wire they cannot spend, yet they never turn on them. Marlow can find no reason for it and calls it restraint.

Aboard the Nellie at dusk, what are Marlow and his friends waiting for as he begins his tale?

The turn of the tide: their yawl lies at anchor, bound downriver. Marlow talks on into the dark, and when he stops their host remarks that they have lost the first of the ebb.

Which city does Conrad's frame narrator call 'the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth'?

London lies upstream under 'a mournful gloom' as the friends sit in their boat on the Thames. Marlow's first words undercut the praise: 'And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth.'

In which periodical was Heart of Darkness first serialised?

Blackwood's Magazine ran it in three monthly parts in 1899. It did not reach book form until 1902, and then only as the second story in a volume named after another tale, Youth.

Marlow, the narrator of Heart of Darkness, also tells the story of which other Conrad novel?

Lord Jim began as a short sketch meant to share a volume with Youth and Heart of Darkness, all three told by Marlow. It outgrew the plan and became a full novel.

In Heart of Darkness, what does the Company doctor measure with calipers before Marlow sails for Africa?

His skull, 'in the interests of science'. Asked if he measures the men again when they come back, the doctor says he never sees them, and adds that 'the changes take place inside'.

Which explorer led the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, whose brutal 'rear column' is often named as a model for Kurtz?

Henry Morton Stanley left the rear column camped on a Congo tributary under Major Edmund Barttelot, who took to whipping his men and was shot dead after threatening a woman for drumming at night.

In Heart of Darkness, how does Marlow drive off the attackers who shower his boat with arrows?

Sounding the steam whistle: its screeches send the attackers fleeing in terror while the white passengers blaze away blindly into the bush. Kurtz's young disciple later admits that Kurtz himself ordered the attack.

In Heart of Darkness, Kurtz writes his report for an International Society for the Suppression of what?

Savage Customs: for the society Kurtz produced seventeen pages of soaring eloquence about the good that white men could do, pages that Marlow admits made him 'tingle with enthusiasm'.

In Heart of Darkness, what postscript does Kurtz scrawl at the foot of his report?

'Exterminate all the brutes!' is scrawled in an unsteady hand, evidently much later, under seventeen pages of noble sentiment. Before Marlow hands the report over back home, he tears the postscript off.

What fascinated Marlow as a child, drawing him to Africa?

The blank spaces on maps: as a boy he would put a finger on one and say, 'When I grow up I will go there.' By the time he went, the biggest blank had filled with names and become 'a place of darkness'.

In Heart of Darkness, what horrifying sight does Marlow find in a shady grove at the Outer Station?

Dying African railway workers: brought from the coast on contracts, they have sickened and crawled into the shade to die. Marlow gives one a ship's biscuit from his pocket and can think of nothing else to do.

What does Marlow discover on reaching the Central Station?

His steamboat has been wrecked: two days earlier the manager set off upriver in a sudden hurry with a volunteer skipper, who tore the bottom out on stones. Looking back, Marlow doubts it was an accident.

What holds Marlow's boat one morning, eight miles short of Kurtz's station?

A dense white fog, 'more blinding than the night', settles at sunrise, and a loud cry 'of infinite desolation' rises out of it. Soon after it lifts, the boat is attacked from the bank.

Who is killed when the steamboat is attacked with arrows near the Inner Station?

The helmsman drops the wheel to fire a rifle through the shutter, and a spear from the bank catches him in the side. He dies at Marlow's feet, filling Marlow's shoes with blood.

What nationality is the wandering admirer of Kurtz who boards Marlow's boat at the Inner Station?

Russian, 'son of an arch-priest', who ran away from school to sea. The old book Marlow found downriver, whose scribbled margins he took for cipher, was his: the notes were simply in his own language.

What does Marlow see on a row of posts outside Kurtz's station house?

Severed heads: through his glasses Marlow first takes them for carved ornamental knobs. All but one of them are turned to face the house.

What word does the Company's station chief use to condemn Kurtz's methods?

'Unsound' is his word for Kurtz's method: what troubles him is that the district is closed to trade for a time. Marlow murmurs back that he sees 'no method at all'.

What are Kurtz's famous last words?

'The horror! The horror!' comes twice, in a cry 'no more than a breath'; Marlow then blows out the candle, goes in to dinner and tells the others nothing.

Who announces Kurtz's death with the line "Mistah Kurtz—he dead"?

The manager's boy puts his head round the mess-room door and says it 'in a tone of scathing contempt'. Everyone rushes out to look; Marlow alone stays at the table and goes on with his dinner.

What does Marlow tell Kurtz's fiancee his final word was?

Her name: Marlow, who says he can't bear a lie, tells one rather than repeat the truth to her. 'I knew it—I was sure!' she cries, and he waits for the house to fall on his head.

In Heart of Darkness, Marlow says that all of which continent 'contributed to the making of Kurtz'?

Europe: his mother was half-English and his father half-French, and he had been educated partly in England, which is why, Marlow notes, Kurtz could talk to him in English.

Kurtz's painting, seen by Marlow, depicts what?

A blindfolded woman carrying a torch, on a ground almost black; the torchlight on her face, Marlow says, is sinister. Kurtz painted it at the Central Station while waiting for a way upriver.

The Congo Free State was privately owned by which monarch from 1885 to 1908?

Leopold II of Belgium owned it outright and never once set foot there. Reports of forced labour and atrocities raised such an outcry that in 1908 his own parliament took the colony over.

Which Irish humanitarian did Conrad befriend in the Congo in 1890, later famous for exposing its abuses?

Roger Casement struck Conrad in 1890 as a man who 'thinks, speaks well'. His consular report later exposed the Congo's forced labour, yet he was hanged in 1916 for seeking German help for an Irish rising.

In Heart of Darkness, what does Marlow mockingly call the idle white agents who wander about with long staves?

Pilgrims: they stroll the station yard with 'absurd long staves', like 'a lot of faithless pilgrims bewitched inside a rotten fence', each waiting for a posting where he can earn his percentage.

Which novelist attacked Heart of Darkness as racist in a 1975 lecture, 'An Image of Africa'?

Chinua Achebe argued that the book uses Africa as a mere backdrop for the break-up of one European mind and so cannot be called great art. The lecture became one of the most influential essays in post-colonial criticism.

Which 1958 Nigerian novel, written partly in answer to books like Conrad's, shows colonialism through Igbo eyes?

Things Fall Apart follows Okonkwo, a proud Igbo leader who kills a colonial messenger when his clan will not fight, then takes his own life. Its title is a line from the Irish poet Yeats.

At the squalid Outer Station in Heart of Darkness, what amazes Marlow about the chief accountant's appearance?

His spotless white clothes: starched collar, snowy trousers and varnished boots, kept up for nearly three years. He has trained a native woman to do his linen, and grumbles that a dying man's groans disturb his sums.

In Heart of Darkness, the city where the Company has its offices always makes Marlow think of what?

A whited sepulchre is the Gospel image for a hypocrite: a tomb whitewashed outside and full of dead men's bones. It fits a city whose Company wraps its hunt for profit in talk of a noble cause.

In Heart of Darkness, Marlow finds a battered old book in an abandoned hut; what is its subject?

Seamanship: a sixty-year-old manual, lovingly restitched. Amid so much sham, its honest concern for the right way of doing a job gives Marlow the sense of having come upon something unmistakably real.

Which T. S. Eliot poem uses "Mistah Kurtz—he dead" as its epigraph?

The Hollow Men (1925) opens with the line. Three years earlier Eliot had wanted Kurtz's death scene as the epigraph to The Waste Land, but Ezra Pound doubted it was 'weighty' enough and talked him out of it.

Which director adapted Heart of Darkness for radio in 1938 and planned it as his first Hollywood film?

Orson Welles meant to film it entirely through Marlow's eyes, with the camera as narrator, but could not cut the budget far enough for his studio. He made Citizen Kane instead.

In Heart of Darkness, Marlow's predecessor as captain was killed in a quarrel with a village chief over what?

Two black hens: Fresleven, by repute 'the gentlest, quietest creature that ever walked on two legs', felt cheated in the bargain and beat the chief with a stick, until the chief's son speared him.

Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now moved the story to which conflict?

The Vietnam War: Captain Willard is sent upriver into Cambodia to 'terminate the command' of Marlon Brando's Colonel Kurtz, a rogue officer whose private army has come to worship him.

Who wrote the original screenplay for Apocalypse Now?

John Milius wrote it in the late 1960s for George Lucas to direct. Only when Lucas left to make Star Wars did Coppola, at first just the producer, take the film over himself.

Apocalypse Now premiered unfinished and won which prize?

The Palme d'Or at Cannes, which the jury split between Coppola's work in progress and The Tin Drum. The finished film did not reach cinemas for another three months.

Which actor was first cast as Willard in Apocalypse Now but replaced by Martin Sheen weeks into the shoot?

Harvey Keitel was let go after Coppola decided he 'found it difficult to play him as a passive onlooker'. His replacement, Martin Sheen, went on to suffer a near-fatal heart attack on location.

What natural disaster wrecked much of the Apocalypse Now sets in the Philippines in May 1976?

A typhoon, Olga, wrecked the sets and shut the production down. Planned to take a few months, the shoot ended up lasting more than a year.

In Heart of Darkness, what one gift, Marlow guesses, keeps the Central Station's mediocre manager in his post?

He never falls ill: he has lasted three terms of three years where other agents sicken and die, and once remarked that men who come out there 'should have no entrails'.

Which science-fiction film sends its hero to the edge of the Solar System to confront his rogue father, echoing Heart of Darkness?

Ad Astra: before filming began, director James Gray compared its story to Conrad's novella. Brad Pitt's astronaut travels out to Neptune to find a father who, like Kurtz, has gone rogue at the far end of the line.

Which 2012 video game moves Heart of Darkness to a sandstorm-buried Dubai, with an officer named John Konrad as its Kurtz?

Spec Ops: The Line sends Captain Walker into the ruined city after Konrad, and as his sanity frays the game pushes players to ask whether war should be entertainment at all.

In Heart of Darkness, Marlow notes with irony that the name Kurtz means what in German?

Short is what Kurtz means in German, and Marlow calls the name as true as everything else in the man's life: carried out on a stretcher, he looked at least seven feet long.

In Heart of Darkness, Marlow opens by imagining which ancient conquerors on a wild river nineteen hundred years ago?

The Romans were, in Marlow's words, no colonists but conquerors who grabbed what they could get. The comparison colours everything he goes on to describe in Africa.

In Heart of Darkness, Marlow says the great river fascinated him as which creature fascinates a silly little bird?

A snake is also what the river itself looked like to him: an immense one uncoiled, its head in the sea and its tail lost in the depths of the land.

Who played the renegade Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, the film loosely based on Heart of Darkness?

Marlon Brando played Kurtz as a highly decorated officer gone rogue, running his own military unit and feared as much by his own side as by the enemy.

At the Inner Station, a young man covered in bright patches waves Marlow ashore; what does Marlow say he resembles?

A harlequin is what the patches of colour all over him suggest to Marlow. The cheerful stranger proves to be a devoted follower who has nursed Kurtz through illness.

Off the African coast in Heart of Darkness, Marlow watches a lone warship doing what at an empty stretch of shore?

Firing shells into the bush achieved nothing: a small flame, a puff of smoke, and silence. Someone aboard assured Marlow that a camp of natives, whom he called enemies, was hidden out of sight.

The real trading company that sent Joseph Conrad up the Congo, the model for Marlow's employer, was based where?

Brussels housed the Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo, whose deputy director Albert Thys hired Conrad in 1890 to serve on its steamers.

What does Marlow keep demanding at the Central Station while caravans bring only calico and beads?

Rivets were everywhere at the Outer Station, Marlow fumes, where you kicked a loose one at every second step, yet not one came upriver to where it was wanted.

In Heart of Darkness, Marlow says he detests what above all, finding in it a taint of death?

Lies make him miserable and sick, he says, like biting into something rotten. He admits it is temperament rather than any claim to be straighter than other men.

The opening pages of Heart of Darkness salute which Elizabethan seafarer, whose Golden Hind came home full of treasure?

Sir Francis Drake opens the narrator's roll of the river's great men, which runs on to Sir John Franklin, whose Erebus and Terror sailed for the Arctic and never returned.

Heart of Darkness never names Kurtz's fiancée; by what term does Kurtz, and then Marlow, refer to her?

The Intended is how Kurtz himself speaks of her, listing her first among the things he calls his own, ahead of his station and his river.

At the Central Station, Marlow meets a first-class agent whose job is to make what, though none can be found?

Bricks never appear because, after more than a year, the agent is waiting for some missing ingredient, straw maybe. The other agents call him the manager's spy.

When Kurtz slips ashore at night from the steamer, how is he moving when Marlow tracks him down?

Crawling on all fours was all his wasted body could manage, yet he had come within thirty yards of the nearest fire before Marlow cut him off.

After Kurtz's death on the voyage downriver in Heart of Darkness, where is his body buried?

In a muddy hole is all Marlow will say of the grave. He kept away from the burial and speaks only of something being put in the ground the next day.

As the steamer bears Kurtz away from the Inner Station, who alone stands unflinching on the bank, arms outstretched?

A superbly adorned woman, her hair dressed like a helmet and her neck hung with glass beads, stretches her bare arms after the boat while the crowd around her breaks and runs.

Joseph Conrad drew on which earlier career, begun in his teens, when he created the storyteller Marlow?

Merchant sailor was Conrad's trade for close to two decades, and under the British flag he rose from steward and apprentice through the mates' ranks to captain.

The narrator of Heart of Darkness twice likens Marlow, sitting with legs folded, to which religious figure?

A Buddha is the image both early on, where Marlow preaches without a lotus-flower, and in the closing lines, where he sits apart, indistinct and silent.

What food did Marlow's African boat crew bring aboard in Heart of Darkness, only for it to go rotten?

Hippo meat stank so badly that the agents on board threw much of it overboard, leaving the crew little but a few lumps of something like half-cooked dough.

How does Marlow cover the two hundred miles from the Outer Station to the Central Station in Heart of Darkness?

On foot it took fifteen days, with a caravan of sixty carriers, along a network of paths through empty country whose people had long since cleared out.

Right after the attack on the steamboat in Heart of Darkness, which of his belongings does Marlow fling overboard?

His shoes had filled with the blood of a crewman speared beside him, and Marlow admits he was morbidly anxious to change them and his socks.

Aboard the yacht at the start of Heart of Darkness, the Accountant brings out which game that nobody ever begins?

Dominoes stay in their box because the friends feel meditative, fit for nothing but placid staring, and so Marlow's long story fills the evening instead.

In Heart of Darkness, what does the Company hand Marlow's African boat crew each week as wages?

Lengths of brass wire, three a week and each about nine inches long, were meant to buy food in riverside villages, but the steamer hardly ever stopped at one.

A man calling himself Kurtz's cousin tells Marlow that Kurtz had the makings of a great success in what?

Music was, Marlow believed, the cousin's own trade as an organist, and Marlow admits that he never did find out what Kurtz's real profession had been.

A journalist tells Marlow that Kurtz, who could electrify large meetings, should have gone into which field?

Politics on the popular side was the journalist's verdict. Asked which party Kurtz would have led, he answered any party, since the man was an extremist.

Believing Kurtz already dead after the attack, Marlow realises he had looked forward above all to what?

Hearing him talk was the whole point, for Marlow had never pictured Kurtz doing anything, only discoursing, a man who presented himself as a voice.

Before Marlow leaves for Africa, the Company doctor asks whether his family has any history of what?

Madness interests the doctor because, he says, the changes in men who go out there take place inside, and he never sees them when they come back.

When a shed of trade goods burns at the Central Station, what is wrong with the pail one agent runs up with?

The bottom leaks, Marlow notices, yet the stout man holding it assures him that everybody is behaving splendidly. The shed is a heap of embers within minutes.

To stop the Central Station's agents quarrelling over precedence at meals, what does the manager have built?

A round table so immense that it needed a special house was his answer, though wherever he sat was the first place and the rest were nowhere.

At the Outer Station, Marlow passes six labourers toiling uphill with baskets of earth; what joins them together?

Iron collars on a chain marked them as what the Company called criminals, and behind them strolled a guard in a uniform jacket, his rifle held by its middle.

In Heart of Darkness, comparing his own age with ancient conquerors, Marlow says what saves us is devotion to what?

Efficiency is the saving grace he claims, yet in the next breath he calls the conquest of the earth not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.

In Apocalypse Now, the film reworking of Heart of Darkness, who plays the manic photojournalist devoted to Kurtz?

Dennis Hopper's babbling disciple, the first to greet Willard at the compound, is said to be based on Sean Flynn, a famed news correspondent who went missing.

In Nicolas Roeg's television film of Heart of Darkness, which actor played Kurtz opposite Tim Roth's Marlow?

John Malkovich played Kurtz in the 1993 film, made for the cable channel TNT from a script by Benedict Fitzgerald, with Isaach de Bankolé and James Fox in support.

Which video game reworks Heart of Darkness as a mercenary's hunt in Africa for an arms dealer called the Jackal?

Far Cry 2 makes the debt plain at the end, where the last area the player reaches is itself called The Heart of Darkness.

Which meeting of fourteen nations in 1884–85 set the rules for the African land grab behind Heart of Darkness?

The Berlin Conference confirmed the lands held by the International Congo Society as that body's own, and within months the territory was renamed the Congo Free State.

Which poet talked T. S. Eliot out of opening The Waste Land with a passage from Heart of Darkness?

Ezra Pound advised against the passage from the tale's climax, even though Eliot called it much the most appropriate epigraph he could find.

Heart of Darkness first reached book form in a 1902 volume named after which earlier Marlow story?

Youth gave the 1902 volume its title and came first in it, ahead of Heart of Darkness and The End of the Tether. It was also the tale in which Marlow made his debut.

In Heart of Darkness, what happens to Marlow on the river soon after Kurtz has been buried?

He nearly dies himself, and reports that wrestling with death is the most unexciting contest imaginable, fought in an impalpable greyness without spectators or glory.

Marlow has heard that the family of Kurtz's fiancée disapproved of the engagement for what reason?

He was not rich enough, Marlow gathers, and impatience with that comparative poverty is what he believes drove Kurtz out to Africa in the first place.

Fifty miles below the Inner Station, Marlow finds a woodpile with a pencilled note urging what?

Haste and caution were both demanded by the faded message, whose signature was illegible, and Marlow was left wondering where exactly he was meant to be careful.

Marlow feels he could poke a finger through a scheming Central Station agent, whom he calls a papier-mâché what?

Mephistopheles, the smooth tempter of the Faust legend, suits an agent Marlow suspects of having nothing inside him but a little loose dirt.

Siding with Kurtz against the Company manager, Marlow says it was something to have at least a choice of what?

Nightmares were all that was on offer, the manager's on one side and Kurtz's on the other, and Marlow accepted the partnership forced on him and stayed loyal to Kurtz.

Marlow says his tin-pot steamboat rang underfoot like an empty Huntley & Palmer tin made to hold what?

Biscuits came in a tin more solid and prettier than the boat, Marlow admits, but he had put so much hard work into her that he loved her.

In Heart of Darkness, under what name does the manager's uncle lead his band of greedy fortune hunters?

The Eldorado Exploring Expedition talked like sordid buccaneers, Marlow says, and long after the wilderness closed over it the only news was that all the donkeys were dead.

The Central Station's foreman, a bearded boiler-maker who befriends Marlow, has which lifelong passion?

Pigeon flying was the widower's one subject apart from his six children, and he tied his waist-length beard up in a napkin when he crawled under the steamboat.

Which Company agent, who sickened and died aboard Conrad's steamer in 1890, is a proposed model for Kurtz?

Georges-Antoine Klein worked for the same trading company as Conrad and died soon after the steamboat picked him up. Researchers have suggested more than twenty prototypes for the character.

Which founder of the Congo Reform Association called Heart of Darkness the most powerful thing written on the subject?

E. D. Morel was a young shipping official who noticed guns and manacles going out to the Congo and rubber coming back, and he built a reform campaign on what that implied.

Which earlier Conrad tale, about two white agents who come to grief in Africa, also grew out of his Congo journey?

An Outpost of Progress came out in 1897, two years ahead of the novella, and in 1906 Conrad was describing it as his best story.

Which Cambridge critic called Heart of Darkness a minor work and faulted its adjectival insistence on mystery?

The same critic still put Conrad in his canon. F. R. Leavis ranked him beside Jane Austen, George Eliot and Henry James in The Great Tradition, his 1948 study of the English novel.

Which first novel by the author of Heart of Darkness follows a Dutch trader dreaming of gold in Borneo?

Almayer's Folly was begun in the autumn of 1889, the year before Conrad sailed for the Congo, but it did not reach print until 1895.

Marlow overhears that Kurtz once came three hundred miles downriver, then turned back for his station in what?

A dugout canoe with four paddlers took him back alone, and Marlow says that picturing the scene gave him his first distinct glimpse of Kurtz.