The Ironic Depiction of Colonialism in The Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad extensively used irony in the Heart of Darkness To comprehend how saturated this novel is with irony one has to have an understanding of the concept of irony Merriam Webster defines verbal irony as the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning situational irony as incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result and Socra