El corazón de las tinieblas

From a very young age, Joseph Conrad was drawn to the African continent and to the adventures that supposedly awaited those who had the courage to venture deep into the jungle. His contact with the reality of the Congo, however, at that time a personal colony of King Leopold II of Belgium, radically changed his vision of things. The slave system and the state of terror, barbarism and genocide established by the king's representatives to ensure the control of millions of Africans by a few Europeans meant not only a disappointment with respect to his childhood illusions, but a serious setback for their physical and mental health. This African experience strongly marked the composition of Heart of Darkness, a complex novel whose innovative narrative style and clearly ambiguous subject matter have made it the touchstone of some of the most prominent literary theories of the second half of the 20th century.