Historical background
Towards the end of the 18th. century imperialism was at its zenith in the UK. However it had differing interpretations. It was associated with the economic interests of businessmen looking for markets, and nationalism represented by the crown. Nonethless, in the middle years of the century colonies had begun to be regarded as burdens and there was a preference for trade. An informal empire had been created that was as much dependent on Britain as the formal empire.
The Empire was held together through British power, particularly naval power. Colonies that were dominated by people of British descent, such as Canada or New Zealand and the states of Australia, had been given substantial powers of self-government since the middle of the century. Yet India, “the jewel in crown,” was held not by consent but by conquest. A viceroy was appointed and control tightened through the construction of a network of railways. Attempts were made to justify British rule in terms of the benefits of law and order for India. However Kipling viewed it as “The white man’s burden,” a worrisome responsibility.
Literary background
Heart of Darkness was published in the late Victorian era and opened up a different view to Victorian values, foreshadowing Modernism.
Victorian writers explored the workings of society at large: Thackeray had described the upper class, Dickens had focused on the underclass and their exploitation. Eliot had centred attention on the rising middle class. Hardy's niche was the rural class. Modernist writers, on the contrary, examined the individual psyche. Conrad’s first person narrative in Heart of Darkness prefigured later modernists’ interest in the representation of consciousness.
Conrad's experiments with a first person narrator such as Marlow, foreshadowed what is known as the “stream-of-consciousness” technique. This stylistic approach evokes the complexity of the individual mind by presenting a character’s thoughts, perceptions, and reactions as a continuous flow. In the postwar period, the stream-of-consciousness technique became a trademark of numerous Modernist novelists, most famously Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust.
Conventional Victorian novels used dependable narrators that the reader could trust. In his novel Conrad distances the reader from Marlow’s first-person account by introducing it as a flashback embedded within another narrative. This distances readers from the narrator and provokes scepticism. Conrad’s use of narrative form to inspire doubt in his readers represented a break from conventional Victorian novels which portrayed a changing but stable, secure society.