Abstract

The aim of this article is to examine the ways Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness dramatizes an existential crisis that is psychologically as well as politically underpinned. It explores how the novel is reflective of the ideological complexities of its day while also corresponding to current ideas in cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind which examine the entanglements of embodied feelings, subjective sentience and the ability to narrativize experientiality in shared language. In investigating how the crisis of narration in Heart of Darkness is reflective of the psychological and existential alienation experienced by the protagonist in the novel, the article draws on debates on the role of the literary narrative as a vehicle to communicate the phenomenal quality of consciousness.