In my view, Heart of Darkness can arguably be seen as one of the first genuinely modernist works of English and of world literature. Several special features about it make me regard it as pathbreaking and as prefiguring developments in both fiction and poetry that were to occur in the next few decades.
Conrad views man in existential terms (as do important earlier writers such as Melville and Tolstoy) with a new emphasis on all of mankind, in a world-wide sense, as facing the universe alone. This is true despite the fact that Conrad also at times still seems to embrace stereotypes about non-Western people. The injustice of colonial exploitation, a central theme in Heart of Darkness, is an idea at his time essentially new in European literature as a whole. Even writers from the period such as Kipling, who is usually considered (and correctly so) conservative, were at least...
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partially beginning to grasp this idea, as he does in his "Recessional." However, it's not just this idea but Conrad's way of presenting it that I would classify as modernist.
Conrad's prose has a stylized, sometimes nearly impenetrable quality that makes him a forerunner of both prose and verse writers of the twentieth century. Heart of Darkness is not a stream-of-consciousness novel, but the narration often plunges into a melding of subjective thought with concrete description in which one's sense of reality is made uncertain. At the same time, an even deeper pessimism than that of the Romantics pervades those pages. Conrad detects a hollowness in the depths of civilization, and it's not surprising that T.S. Eliot alludes to Heart of Darkness in his "The Hollow Men." There is also an incidental significance in the fact that Eliot's friend Ezra Pound told him that he disliked reading prose, "except Conrad." What these modernist writers detected was a new, critical view that Conrad was directing at the world—a view that became the quintessential one of the whole modernist movement.
In terms of literary movements, Heart of Darkness is often cited as a transition into modern realism. First appearing in print in 1899 as a magazine serial, it was then published in novel form in 1902 as part of a collection of Conrad's work. It has been referred to as a novel that acts as a bridge between the Romantic literature of the 19th Century and the modern realism of the 20th Century. In its stark depiction of the stupidity, cruelty, and greed of colonial policies inflicted upon native populations, the novel creates a narrative of realistic, often shocking detail. It focuses upon the inner life of its protagonist, Charlie Marlow, but not in the manner associated with Romanticism; instead it explores Marlow (and his antagonistKurtz) in terms of the human psyche. The influence of Sigmund Freud's revolutionary modern theories of the unconscious self is readily apparent in the novel. Other literary techniques, such as the complex structure and point of view, moved the novel into the realm of modern realism and foreshadowed the work of important 20th Century writers that followed.