Heart of Darkness Themes

(Click the themes infographic to download.) From the minute you wake up in the morning, life is a moral struggle: hit the snooze button, or get up and go for that run you promised yourself you'd...

(Click the themes infographic to download.) Move over, Mother Nature: there's a new wilderness in town. In Heart of Darkness, the natural world isn't a place of comfort or pleasure or even mild n...

(Click the themes infographic to download.) Conrad doesn't exactly want to buy the world a Coke, but he does seem to have some unconventional ideas about race—at least, unconventional for the l...

(Click the themes infographic to download.) By the end of his journey into the Congo, Marlow is so mixed up that he might as well be singing, "I Am the Walrus." Although he starts off with a pret...

(Click the themes infographic to download.) Everyone wants to be powerful. (Even you. Even Shmoop.) And the people in Heart of Darkness are willing to do some pretty nasty things to get their way...

(Click the themes infographic to download.) Sorry, ladies: there's basically nothing for you here. Seriously. Conrad is all about the gentlemen. For Marlow—and presumably for Conrad, too, altho...

(Click the themes infographic to download.) The Company's continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before....

(Click the themes infographic to download.) There's method in this madness: Kurtz has gone from noble conqueror to deranged slaver because his power and greed have been totally unchecked. Ergo, i...

(Click the themes infographic to download.) For someone who wrote a lot of big words, Conrad seems to have some serious doubts about the power of language. In Heart of Darkness, words are always...

(Click the themes infographic to download.) The white pilgrims go into the interior in constant fear of their surroundings. Their trepidation is so strong that they develop a paranoia of the wild...

(Click the themes infographic to download.) Marlow’s journey toward the interior and toward Kurtz seems inevitable, as if Marlow is drawn nearer and nearer to the heart of darkness by his own m...

(Click the themes infographic to download.) Conrad plays with readers’ sense of time to emphasize certain points in the plot of Heart of Darkness. Marlow tells his story aboard the Nellie so re...