Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness tells the story of a man who ventured too far into the darker areas of his own soul. He is presented as much affected by his locale, and there is a certain racist component in this analysis given the way Conrad contrasts the civilization of white Britain and the non-civilization of black Africa. The very image of darkness raises a question for some as to how darkness and so blackness are identified with evil. Yet, Marlow, the man who goes to Africa to find Kurtz and bring him back, has a different conception of evil and knows that it lurks in every heart. His is not a racist view but a realist's view, and he worries as much about his own soul as he does about Kurtz. What may be right for one social group, given their circumstances and the way they are tied to the land and to the jungle, is very different from what is right for a society such as produced Kurtz and Marlow.
The character of Marlow is a persona for the author used in several stories and novels, and he 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. 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. This 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. For Marlow, society is something the individual should bend to in order to maintain the social order...