What Do I Read Next?
- Published in 1900, Lord Jim is another maritime tale by Conrad that explores themes of honor amidst severe personal danger and the colonial imposition on indigenous people. Marlow returns as a narrator, recounting the story of Jim, a simple sailor who struggles and ultimately fails to uphold an honorable code of conduct.
- Nostromo (1904), Conrad's most expansive and ambitious novel, features multiple protagonists and shifts back and forth over an extensive timeline. The novel transposes Conrad's familiar focus on colonial interests to a fictional South American country teeming with political turmoil.
- Conrad's 1907 novel, The Secret Agent, delves into political terrorism and centers on a protagonist who, unlike Kurtz, seeks to stay neutral and avoid commitment in a world rife with conflict. Adolf Verloc, the book's double agent, is unwillingly drawn into actions that lead to multiple murders and a suicide.
- Set in Nigeria, his native country, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958) depicts the tragic impact of European colonialism on one man's life.
- Winner of the 1991 National Book Award for fiction, Middle Passage by Charles Johnson tells the story of a free black man in New Orleans who stows away on a ship, only to discover it is a slave trader headed for Africa.
- In Travellers in Africa: British Travelogues, 1850-1900, Volume 1, Tim Youngs compiles authentic nineteenth-century British accounts of African voyages and discusses the social, cultural, and racial attitudes of the time. The volume includes an analysis of Heart of Darkness as a travel narrative, comparing Marlow's depiction of the Congo with that of British-American explorer Sir Henry Morton Stanley.
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