Heart of Darkness
READING AGE 16+
Heart of Darkness is a journey to the dark soul of mankind. In creating this fiction Conrad uses the technique of the Iliad. He also uses the technique which we find in The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner where the narrator has to keep repeating his story in an effort to cleanse the memory. Christian symbolism is rampant as Conrad shows us the pilgrims, the spear through the side of his helmsman, the episode with his shoes redolent of Jesus telling his disciples to shake off the dust from their sandals. The novella overall has a Nietzschian quality as the colonists strive to achieve their goals through a will to power over the indigent people of Africa. The women in the novella are reminiscent of the Madonna/ w***e complex. By the end of the narrative we are almost ready to start again hoping for a different outcome.--Submitted by Tom Keane
Conrad never tells us where Heart of Darkness is set. It begins on a boat moored on the Thames, with the glow of the City in the background, waiting for the tide to turn. Marlow, the narrator, tells of his boyhood yearning to visit the empty places of the world, and goes on to reminisce about his short time as a river-boat captain, on an endless river, in a dark continent, in the service of a European financial power. He never gives a more exact location than this, for the heart of darkness is an imaginative location, a place that may be anywhere, a dark violence that has no boundaries, with a starting point that is as likely to be the City glowing behind the narrator, as anywhere else.--Submitted by Anonymous
Heart of Darkness can be seen in some angles as an autobiographical novel by Conrad. The party dealing properly with the title begins when Marlow, on board with his friends on the Thames, takes his turn to tell a history to help them shorten mentally their trip. Marlow grows from a casual critic as the story in which he's implicated begins to an other person for his sound judgment is influenced by the harsh conditions he lived during his trip to rescue Kurtz. He even reaches a point where he loses his philanthropic character by judging severely the people who have not endured what he endured in Africa.--Submitted by Sawadogo Salfo
Unfold
"I looked at him, lost in astonishment. There he was before me, in motley, as though he had absconded from a troupe of mimes, enthusiastic, fabulous. His very existence was improbable, inexplicable, and altogether bewildering. He was an insoluble problem. It was inconceivable how he had existed, how he had succeeded in getting so far, how he ha……
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