Heart of Darkness

''I asked myself what I was doing there with a sensation of panic in my heart as though I had blundered into a place of cruel and absurd mysteries not fit for a human being to behold''. Charles Marlow''s dark intuition here arrives at the culmination of his physical and psychological quest in search of the infamous ivory-trader Kurtz in Joseph Conrad''s most famous short story Heart of Darkness. Ambiguously drawn to the powerful ''voice'' of this autocratic European who has become a self-proclaimed ruler in an African colony Marlow is increasingly embroiled in Kurtz''s life and death: he is finally forced into a radical questioning not only of his own assumptions but also of the civilized and imperial pretensions of Western Europe. Offering a freshly-researched text based on the writer''s original documents this edition presents a classic of early modernist fiction in a version that for the first time recovers Conrad''s preferred wordings punctuation and narrative structure.