This is a book I read twice and will probably never read again. I try to see this as a "great" novel but I have always wished Conrad had achieved a greater separation between his own voice and Marlow's. For me his inability to do so made it difficult to stomach the inherent racism in the book. The passage that will always stick out in my mind is the one in which the narrator muses that an educated black man is as "unnatural" as a dog putting on clothes and walking on its hindlegs.

That said, I don't think this book is worthless. In my experience the people I've discussed it with tend to either completely ignore the racism or excuse it and instead focus on the pyschological state of Kurtz or else they see the racism and completely dismiss the pyschological and other symbolic aspects of the book. For me this is not a great novel in the sense of it being one of the best ever written. There are just too many internal tensions and the blurring of the character's and author's perspectives makes this a very uncomfortable read. It is a great book for discussion though if all of its tensions are recognized. There is a powerful message here about how the darkness of the mind (and one's own inhumanity) can be projected onto others and one's environment and there is something very anti-colonialist and anti-racist about that. At the same time, these themes exist side by side with the author's own unacknowledged racism. Knowing that a book was written long ago helps contextualize and explain something offensive but I don't think it ever makes it less painful to read. For me the value in Heart of Darkness is in examining both the story Conrad set out to tell and the one he didn't even realize he was telling when he wrote this book.