‘Heart of Darkness’ stands at the threshold of Conrad's major creative phase. Before producing that narrative he had been unable to make any progress on Lord Jim, a novel he had been trying to get under way from some months. After it, however, he was able to work uninterruptedly on the new project, completing it in just under one year. Lord Jim was published in book form in 1900; it was followed, if not quickly at least steadily, by the two great masterpieces Nostromo (published 1904) and The Secret Agent (published 1907); these in their turn were succeeded by Under Western Eyes (published 1911), which fittingly brought to a close the most productive decade of Conrad's life.

The reason why ‘Heart of Darkness’ occupies a special place in the Conrad canon is that it was the first of his works fully to disclose the possibilities of tragedy. In The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, to be sure, the crew had been torn between incompatible claims, but the conditions of their life had induced them to choose right: Conrad had been able to turn his back on acknowledged complexity in the name of a moral positive.