Heart of Darkness question

I read it, and enjoyed it, because I have worked several times in the DRC. Specifically, although I was there almost a century later, I recognised and even identified with the European characters and their interactions with the locals. Colonial attitudes have not changed much, they have merely been put in a box. As for the horror, despite the violence that has ravaged the eastern DRC for the last 25 years, it is not obvious in the vibrant cultural and community life that you experience when you are on the ground there. In sum, I didn't find the heart of darkness. You might find my memoirs useful, which deal with the issues of the quest for the heart of darkness in modern conflicts, and explore in detail my experiences in the DRC: The Damned Balkans: A Refugee Road Trip.

I would say for me, the main theme is that war is horrible on so many levels. I read this as a anti war story and finding himself through his trials as slowly lost sight of his goal. In the end it drove him to mad.

Watching the movie "Apocalypse Now", Heart of Darkness set in Vietnam, brought home that history has repeated itself many times in these themes.

If it's of any use, here is my Goodreads review. If you haven't found it already, be sure to check David Denby's Great Books, his account of taking Columbia University's Western Civilization course. The last chapter is devoted to Heart of Darkness.
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Conrad’s novella remains firmly in the Western Canon, but not without deep ambivalence and steady controversy. Like any great work, it always challenges expectations.

Heart of Darkness may well embody a scathing condemnation of imperialism through its depiction of one of the ugliest exercises of colonial rule, that of Belgium and King Leopold in the Congo. But it’s deepest theme is the savagery of the soul, without god or goodness, when confronted with the abyss, the unknowable.

Kurtz, the mysterious figure that the narrator, Marlow, seeks on his perilous journey up the Congo River is more the embodiment of this terror, this inability to face the impenetrable blankness of the jungle that stretches away from the river and Marlow’s “beetle-like” steamer.

No one prays in Heart of Darkness, either for rescue, salvation, protection from disease, or even for ivory. If there were missionaries in the Belgian Congo — a pious Victorian age, after all — Conrad seems to have missed them. Instead, he depicts the moral and physical collapse of the white traders, strewn like trapped animals in rotting trading posts along the river.

The Africans, by contrast, are wraith-like, unknowable, and more a product of European fears and fantasies than real characters. They barely speak, and while Marlow/Conrad is clearly horrified at their treatment, he also has difficulty seeing them as fully human. But it’s also important to couple Conrad’s implicit racism with his uncompromising portrayal of Western avariciousness — for ivory in this case — that consumes the souls of men like Kurtz.

In the end, Heart of Darkness is a horror story, the dark ravening animal in the cellar that any of us might unleash in a world without in a world without light or humanity.

Conrad’s tale embodies Nietzsche’s thought: “If you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you.” In other words, look too hard into darkness and you might that you are your worst fears — and catch yourself muttering, with Kurtz, “The horror … the horror.”

The main thought I have after reading Heart of Darkness is that all the subjects are very hard core people and that the hard core guy telling the story showed that he did have a sensitive side when he told the white lie to the fiancé of the subject of the story, to keep her from being hurt by the real story....

A couple of points on formatting and structure. I was impressed that almost the whole book is a monologue. Also the way the author jumps ahead in the story and then backtracks to filling the missing parts. That is not an easy thing for an author to do, without confusing the reader. Try it, and see what your editors say! Keith Brown