Heart of Darkness Trivia
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97 free Heart of Darkness trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Heart of Darkness is 30,000 words long, was written by a Polish sailor in his third language, and has been argued over more than almost any other book on a university syllabus. This quiz covers the novella itself: Marlow on the Thames, the Company's stations, the wrecked steamboat, the fog and the arrows, the Russian harlequin, the heads on posts, Kurtz's pamphlet and its scrawled postscript, "The horror! The horror!", and the lie Marlow tells the Intended. It also covers where the book came from and where it went: Conrad's 1890 job on a Belgian steamer up the Congo, Leopold II's Congo Free State, the possible models for Kurtz, the three-part serial in Blackwood's 1000th issue, Leavis calling it minor, Chinua Achebe calling it offensive, T. S. Eliot's "Mistah Kurtz—he dead", Orson Welles's lost film, Roddy McDowall and Boris Karloff, John Malkovich, Ad Astra, Spec Ops: The Line and, above all, Apocalypse Now. Easy questions ask who wrote it and where it is set; the expert tier asks for models, magazines and adaptations. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Heart of Darkness, Kurtz, Joseph Conrad, the Congo Free State and Apocalypse Now, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question. If you like this, try our quizzes on Joseph Conrad, classic novels and Apocalypse Now.
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Q 01The author of Heart of Darkness learned English only in his twenties; what was his first language?
Polish
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.
Q 02Whose poem 'The White Man's Burden' appeared in 1899, like Heart of Darkness?
Kipling
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.
Q 03In Heart of Darkness, which relative pulls strings to get Marlow his job with the Company?
His aunt
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.
Q 04In Heart of Darkness, what are the two women outside the Company's office doing as Marlow goes in to sign on?
Knitting black wool
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.
Q 05In Heart of Darkness, which commodity does the Company's trade revolve around?
Ivory
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.
Q 06In Heart of Darkness, Marlow marvels at the restraint of his hungry boat crew, who are what?
Cannibals
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.
Q 07Aboard the Nellie at dusk, what are Marlow and his friends waiting for as he begins his tale?
The turn of the tide
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.
Q 08Which city does Conrad's frame narrator call 'the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth'?
London
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.'
Q 09In which periodical was Heart of Darkness first serialised?
Blackwood's Magazine
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.
Q 10Marlow, the narrator of Heart of Darkness, also tells the story of which other Conrad novel?
Lord Jim
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.
Q 11In Heart of Darkness, what does the Company doctor measure with calipers before Marlow sails for Africa?
His skull
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'.
Q 12Which explorer led the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, whose brutal 'rear column' is often named as a model for Kurtz?
Henry Morton Stanley
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.
Q 13In Heart of Darkness, how does Marlow drive off the attackers who shower his boat with arrows?
Q 21What nationality is the wandering admirer of Kurtz who boards Marlow's boat at the Inner Station?
Russian
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.
Q 22What does Marlow see on a row of posts outside Kurtz's station house?
Severed heads
Severed heads: through his glasses Marlow first takes them for carved ornamental knobs. All but one of them are turned to face the house.
Q 23What word does the Company's station chief use to condemn Kurtz's methods?
Unsound
'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'.
Sounding the steam whistle
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.
Q 14In Heart of Darkness, Kurtz writes his report for an International Society for the Suppression of what?
Savage Customs
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'.
Q 15In Heart of Darkness, what postscript does Kurtz scrawl at the foot of his report?
Exterminate all the brutes!
'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.
Q 16What fascinated Marlow as a child, drawing him to Africa?
The blank spaces on maps
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'.
Q 17In Heart of Darkness, what horrifying sight does Marlow find in a shady grove at the Outer Station?
Dying African railway workers
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.
Q 18What does Marlow discover on reaching the Central Station?
His steamboat has been wrecked
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.
Q 19What holds Marlow's boat one morning, eight miles short of Kurtz's station?
A dense white fog
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.
Q 20Who is killed when the steamboat is attacked with arrows near the Inner Station?
The helmsman
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.
Q 24What are Kurtz's famous last words?
The horror! The horror!
'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.
Q 25Who announces Kurtz's death with the line "Mistah Kurtz—he dead"?
The manager's boy
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.
Q 26What does Marlow tell Kurtz's fiancee his final word was?
Her name
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.
Q 27In Heart of Darkness, Marlow says that all of which continent 'contributed to the making of Kurtz'?
Europe
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.
Q 28Kurtz's painting, seen by Marlow, depicts what?
A blindfolded woman carrying a torch
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.
Q 29The Congo Free State was privately owned by which monarch from 1885 to 1908?
Leopold II of Belgium
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.
Q 30Which Irish humanitarian did Conrad befriend in the Congo in 1890, later famous for exposing its abuses?
Roger Casement
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.