In Heart of Darkness, the character of Marlow, a persona for the author used in several stories and novels, makes a journey from civilization into the darkest part of Africa to bring back a man named Kurtz who has gone into the interior and shed his civilized exterior to degenerate into the primitive. The meaning of "heart of darkness" is multiple, with different levels of darkness and different levels of journeying into the darkness. The primary reference is to the human heart. For Conrad, the individual possesses within himself the possibility of the primitive, but society and civilization have created a framework of control by which the individual can escape from that state. Marlow makes a journey from civilization into the jungle, into the primitive, and he also makes a journey into his own heart and the darkness he finds there. This journey reflects the darkness that Conrad sees in every human soul and serves therefore to carry the reader into his or her own particular darkness. The journey is itself a symbol of the ability of marlow to delve into the human heart.
This sense of the contrast between civilization and the primitive, between the light and the dark, seems evident in the opening passages as Marlow is about to tell his story to the other men sitting on the deck and refers to the civilizing influence of Western culture from Roman times to the present. The England of two thousand years ago, the England to which the Romans came, is compared to the Africa to which Marlow has traveled, and this connection indicates the primitive nature of Africa, setting it up as a pre-civilized place. The England of the past is evoked through the image of the river on which these men are now sitting, a river that has been in place for many thousands of years The river is symbolic of the journey of life and is the connection between civilization and the primitive. The individual has a dark side that has to be controlled, and this...