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Background

Eight and a half years before writing the book, Conrad had gone to serve as the captain of a Congo steamer. However, upon arriving in the Congo, he found his steamer damaged and under repair. He soon became ill and returned to Europe before ever serving as captain. Some of Conrad's experiences in the Congo, and the story's historic background, including possible models for Kurtz, are recounted in Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost.^{[citation needed]}

The story-within-a-story device (called framed narrative in literary terms) that Conrad chose for Heart of Darkness — one in which an unnamed narrator relates Charles Marlow's account of his journey — has many literary precedents. Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein used a similar device, but the best known examples of the framed narrative include Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, The Arabian Nights and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.