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50 free Heart of Darkness trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Heart of Darkness is 30,000 words long, was written by a Polish sailor in his third language, and has been argued over more than almost any other book on a university syllabus. This quiz covers the novella itself: Marlow on the Thames, the Company's stations, the wrecked steamboat, the fog and the arrows, the Russian harlequin, the heads on posts, Kurtz's pamphlet and its scrawled postscript, "The horror! The horror!", and the lie Marlow tells the Intended. It also covers where the book came from and where it went: Conrad's 1890 job on a Belgian steamer up the Congo, Leopold II's Congo Free State, the possible models for Kurtz, the three-part serial in Blackwood's 1000th issue, Leavis calling it minor, Chinua Achebe calling it offensive, T. S. Eliot's "Mistah Kurtz—he dead", Orson Welles's lost film, Roddy McDowall and Boris Karloff, John Malkovich, Ad Astra, Spec Ops: The Line and, above all, Apocalypse Now. Easy questions ask who wrote it and where it is set; the expert tier asks for models, magazines and adaptations. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Heart of Darkness, Kurtz, Joseph Conrad, the Congo Free State and Apocalypse Now, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question. If you like this, try our quizzes on Joseph Conrad, classic novels and Apocalypse Now.
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Q 01Who wrote Heart of Darkness?
Joseph Conrad
He was born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski and did not speak English fluently until his twenties.
Q 02In what year was Heart of Darkness first published?
1899
It ran as a three-part serial in February, March and April.
Q 03Who narrates the main story in Heart of Darkness?
Charles Marlow
Conrad said Marlow first appeared in his earlier story Youth.
Q 04Marlow is hired as captain of what kind of vessel?
A river steamboat
He spends months fishing it out of the river and repairing it before he can set off.
Q 05What commodity does the Company trade in?
Ivory
Kurtz is its most prolific ivory agent, and the manager resents him for it.
Q 06Which river, never named in the text, is the setting of most of the novella?
The Congo
The Congo Free State was then the private colony of Belgium's King Leopold II.
Q 07Where does the frame story of Heart of Darkness take place?
On the Thames near London
Marlow reminds his listeners that the Romans would have found savagery here nineteen hundred years earlier.
Q 08Which city does Conrad's narrator call "the greatest town on earth" while drawing parallels between it and Africa as places of darkness?
London
The comparison is central to the book's argument that civilised people and savages differ little.
Q 09In which periodical was Heart of Darkness first serialised?
Blackwood's Magazine
The February 1899 issue was the magazine's 1000th, a special edition.
Q 10Heart of Darkness first appeared in book form in 1902 alongside which two other stories?
Youth and The End of the Tether
Conrad had originally planned a Marlow trilogy of Youth, Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim.
Q 11How old was Conrad when a Belgian trading company appointed him to one of its Congo steamers in 1890?
32
When the captain fell ill, Conrad took command and steered up the Lualaba to the innermost station at Kindu.
Q 12How many years after returning from Africa did Conrad start writing the novella?
Eight
He drew on his travel journals and called it "a wild story".
Q 13Conrad described the novella to a friend as roughly how many words long?
30,000
He said the final interview between the man and the girl locks the whole narrative into "one suggestive view of a whole phase of life".
Which agent who fell ill and died aboard Conrad's own steamer is often proposed as a basis for Kurtz?
Q 21What does Marlow discover on reaching the Central Station?
His steamboat has been wrecked
He learns the manager resents Kurtz rather than admiring him, and spends months on repairs.
Q 22How long does the journey from the Central Station to Kurtz's station take?
Two months
The party pauses about eight miles below the Inner Station and wakes in thick fog.
Q 23Who is killed when the steamboat is attacked with arrows near the Inner Station?
The helmsman
Marlow frightens the attackers off by repeatedly sounding the steam whistle.
Georges-Antoine Klein
Researchers have suggested more than twenty prototypes for the character.
Q 15Members of the disastrous "rear column" of which venture have been suggested as sources for Kurtz?
The Emin Pasha Relief Expedition
Its leader Henry Morton Stanley and column commander Edmund Barttelot are among the names cited.
Q 16Which Congo Free State administrator does Adam Hochschild name as the principal inspiration for Kurtz, citing heads on stakes?
Leon Rom
Hochschild's book King Leopold's Ghost argues the novella barely exaggerates the real Congo.
Q 17What organisation commissioned the report that Kurtz writes?
The International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs
It is read as a sarcastic dig at the International Association of the Congo.
Q 18What chilling postscript does Kurtz scrawl at the end of his report?
Exterminate all the brutes!
It undercuts the altruistic sentiments of the pages before it.
Q 19What fascinated Marlow as a child, drawing him to Africa?
The blank spaces on maps
The image of a river on the map particularly drew his attention.
Q 20What horrifying sight does Marlow find in a ravine near the Outer Station?
Dying African railway workers
The chief accountant then tells him of the remarkable Mr Kurtz, who "will go far".
Q 24What nationality is the wandering admirer of Kurtz who boards Marlow's boat at the Inner Station?
Russian
His patched clothes earn him the nickname the Harlequin.
Q 25What does Marlow see on a row of posts outside Kurtz's station house?
Severed heads
Kurtz then appears, carried on a stretcher like a ghost, and calms the massed natives with a shout.
Q 26What word does the Company's station chief use to condemn Kurtz's methods?
Unsound
He complains that Kurtz has harmed the company's business in the region.
Q 27What are Kurtz's famous last words?
The horror! The horror!
Marlow hears him whisper them weakly as the steamer heads downriver.
Q 28Who announces Kurtz's death with the line "Mistah Kurtz—he dead"?
The manager's boy
T. S. Eliot took the line as the epigraph for The Hollow Men.
Q 29What does Marlow tell Kurtz's fiancee his final word was?
Her name
She is still deep in mourning more than a year after his death.
Q 30According to the novella, Kurtz's mother was half English and his father half French, so "All ... contributed to the making of Kurtz." All what?
Europe
He was a painter, musician, writer and promising politician before the jungle changed him.