Heart Of Darkness

I'm sure this has been said already, but I find the main theme of the book, the hypocrisy of imperialism and all the evils that encompasses, quite entertaining. The idea of shoving society in your face and saying "this is what it is" and displaying all the follies involved is quite invigorating. It's nice to see a novel throw away all the ideas that a society (granted in their naivte) held dear to them, all to show them how decrepit and how animal-like they have become. Imperialism and society at the time was pretty dark and Conrad's novel brought everything to light. The author brought out all the dark issues from Africa and put them out for all to see.

Heart of Darkness

We go through Marlow's journey through the Congo. We see the muck and the sickness of that area. I find it interesting the race issues that are tackled in the book. There is an almost costant contrast of black and white within the novel. We see the horrible images and the detail of the muck and the excrement that shows that areas viscous history.

"Heart of Darkness" tells us the journey of a man into a dark truth of mankind, we are animals when it comes to greed and survival. The people are blinded by greed and can not see that the workers are human too. The darkness of the land gets to them and turns them into beasts that consume as much as they can. Symbolism is used often throughout the story. Darkness is constantly referred to describing the land and at the same time it represents the Europeans who are evil and have destroyed the land.

Heart of Darkness

Reading this story made me think about today's society and their insanity levels. If you walk the streets of New York City you can see some pretty unusual things. Such as a half naked man and a cowgirl walking the streets of Manhattan. In this book we found some unusual events as well. One of the men at a station was carrying a bucket of water with a huge hole in the bottom of the bucket?! Things that one party may see as awkward and strange the others may see as fun-filled and pleasurable.
When i was reading this story and the men were shooting aimlessly i compared it to the Deer Hunter. Here are these men who have nothing better to do than hang out and shoot aimless shots into the air whereas in the Deer Hunter here are these close friends who know they are about to go on a journey with an unknown ending and want to spend some time together and bond with each other. In both cases these men are bonding. Men have a type of bonding where they dont have to say anything but just be together and do things together and they will feel united.

To go back to our humble origins and look at “Heart of Darkness” as its literary elements, it seems a story driven, not by plot or by character, but rather by setting. Marlowe, the narrator, functions much as the narrator does in Bartleby the Scrivener, as a lens (though a somewhat warped one) through which the reader sees the events of the story unfold. And Mr. Kurtz seemed more a plot point than an actual character; his reputation drove the tension in the story and gave the reader something to look forward to, but too much description was invested in the actual place itself (assumed to be the Congo River) that it seems that that is the focal point of the story.

Before leaving Fiedler and starting Orientalism, I wanted to point out a scene in the beginning of Chapter 3 when Marlowe tells his audience that they spoke of love, and our real narrator, who we only see briefly in the beginning and occasionally through the story responds, “much amused,” whereupon Marlowe quickly disclaims “It isn’t what you think…”

Heart of Darkness

Darkness certainly plays an important role in Conrad's work. Its very inclusion in the name of the story indicates that it is an element that must be considered in light of the work. Certainly, Conrad's entire work is dark, and the setting often seems dark as well. Africa is often referred to the Dark contintent- devoid of civilization and beyond the understanding of the civilized world. Certainly, in Conrad's work, the lack of understanding or sympathy on the part of the imperialist powers present, make Africa a "dark contintent"- misunderstood and abused, as the imperialists fail to consider the humanity of their African counterparts. And indeed, in this work, it is not merely a lack of civilization that can make a country or people, 'dark'. The imperialists, with all their supposed civilization and technology, are, through their abuse and corruption of that civilization, rendered 'dark' as well.

Heart of Darkness

The contrast between Marlow and Kurtz illuminates the inherent hypocrisy of imperialism. Marlow seems to represent the idea of "civilizing" a savage nation. Contrastingly, Kurtz is much more honest, he is not ashamed to admit that he forcefully engages in cannibalism, with out any lofty moral goals. However, this appears to be unacceptable because it portrays the Western "civilizers" as cannibalistic and equivalent on a moral scale to those they wish to civilize. Deborah Root discusses this idea in her book Cannibal Culture. According to Root, when Western imperialists project tropes of savagery and violence on exotic, or different, cultures on order to justify their own savagery and violence (imperialism). It seems that the stark contrast between Kurtz and Marlow serves to highlight this idea.