Heart of Darkness (Conrad) practice questions and exam guide

Conrad drew on personal experience during which trip?

1. His 1890 trip up the Congo as a steamer commander
2. A 1888 Australian voyage
3. A 1900 voyage to India
4. A 1895 South American expedition

Answer: A — His 1890 trip up the Congo as a steamer commander

A is correct — the Congo voyage is the autobiographical engine. B, C, and D are the wrong journeys.

The Intended is described as:

1. Pale, mournful, dressed in black, faithful to an idealized Kurtz
2. A skeptical realist
3. A Company shareholder
4. An adventurer in her own right

Answer: A — Pale, mournful, dressed in black, faithful to an idealized Kurtz

A is correct — she embodies the European illusion Marlow chooses to preserve. B, C, and D give her agency the text withholds.

Modern critique of Conrad's depiction of Africans points out that:

1. They speak for long stretches
2. Conrad invents African dialects
3. They mostly serve as background or symbol, rarely as full subjects
4. Africans narrate alongside Marlow

Answer: C — They mostly serve as background or symbol, rarely as full subjects

C is correct — Achebe's central charge concerns the function of African figures in the text. A, B, and D misdescribe the novel.

Roughly fifty miles short of Kurtz's station, the steamer is attacked. The attackers fire:

1. Rifles
2. Cannon
3. Arrows that Marlow at first mistakes for sticks
4. Stones

Answer: C — Arrows that Marlow at first mistakes for sticks

C is correct — the famous instance of impressionistic delayed decoding. A and B overestimate local arms. D trivializes the scene.

Chinua Achebe's 1977 essay 'An Image of Africa' argues that:

1. Conrad uses Africa as a backdrop for European psychology and reproduces racist conventions
2. Conrad is anti-imperial in a way that fully respects Africans
3. Conrad celebrates African religion
4. Conrad invents African languages

Answer: A — Conrad uses Africa as a backdrop for European psychology and reproduces racist conventions

A is correct — the charge is functional and rhetorical. B misstates the essay. C and D misdescribe the novel.

The whited sepulchre is Conrad's image for:

1. A graveyard outside Brussels
2. The Manager's house
3. The Inner Station
4. Brussels itself — an outwardly clean tomb full of decay

Answer: D — Brussels itself — an outwardly clean tomb full of decay

D is correct — the biblical phrase fixes Europe as the corrupted center. A, C, and B mislocate the metaphor.

Who narrates the outermost layer of the novella?

1. Marlow himself
2. The Director of Companies
3. Kurtz, recalled
4. An unnamed listener aboard the Nellie

Answer: D — An unnamed listener aboard the Nellie

D is correct — an unnamed passenger reports Marlow's spoken story. A confuses inner and outer layers. C is impossible (Kurtz is dead). B is a character on board but not the narrator.

Before the Congo, Kurtz is presented as a:

1. Failed colonial soldier
2. Career bureaucrat
3. Self-made trader
4. Painter, journalist, musician — a 'universal genius' of European culture

Answer: D — Painter, journalist, musician — a 'universal genius' of European culture

D is correct — Kurtz embodies the whole European ideal. A demotes him. C and B shrink his polyhistor profile.

Fog in the novella primarily figures:

1. The moral and epistemic blindness of imperial advance
2. Bad weather
3. Tropical climate
4. Disease

Answer: A — The moral and epistemic blindness of imperial advance

A is correct — the fog blinds the steamer at the threshold of contact. B, C, and D narrow the symbol.

The theme of 'the lie' in the novella is best stated as:

1. Lies are pragmatic
2. Lies belong only to Africans
3. Lies are never told
4. Lies have a flavor of mortality Marlow loathes — and yet utters

Answer: D — Lies have a flavor of mortality Marlow loathes — and yet utters

B is correct — Marlow says lies make him sick, then he tells the largest one in the book. A, C, and D miss the moral pressure.

Marlow refers to the white agents at Central Station as:

1. Soldiers
2. Engineers
3. Pilgrims, because they wander with staves
4. Settlers

Answer: C — Pilgrims, because they wander with staves

C is correct — the staves they carry give them their ironic name. A, B, and D miss the sardonic edge.

The novella's silences — what Marlow cannot or will not say — are a deliberate sign of:

1. Sloppy drafting
2. Marlow's lack of vocabulary
3. Censorship by Blackwood's
4. Modernist commitment to the limits of representation

Answer: D — Modernist commitment to the limits of representation

D is correct — opacity is a strategy. A, C, and B explain it away.

Theme: the darkness 'in here.'

Conrad locates 'darkness' not in Africa but in Europe — London too has been 'one of the dark places of the earth.' Geography is inverted.

Who is Marlow?

English sailor + Conrad's recurring narrator. Captains a small steamer up the Congo to retrieve the ivory agent Kurtz.

The Company?

A Belgian trading concern (modeled on the Société Anonyme Belge). Marlow is hired in Brussels. Its operations stand for European extraction generally.

The death of the helmsman?

During an attack the African helmsman is killed by a spear at Marlow's feet. Marlow shoves the body overboard before cannibal crewmen 'tasted' it.

Who is the African woman at the Inner Station?

A regal unnamed woman associated with Kurtz. Her presence opposes the Intended's pale European mourning.

Setting?

Frame: a yawl on the Thames at dusk. Inner story: the Congo Free State under King Leopold II of Belgium, ~1890.