Category: Heart of Darkness

Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in a New Light Vituperative, unwavering, and fiercely intent on drawing conclusions, Chinua Achebe asks in reference to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: “the question is whether a novel which celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art” . His answer,…

Marlon Brando gets no more than eighteen minutes of screen time in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, but his performance goes down as one of the most legendary in cinematic history. His portrayal of the Colonel Kurtz painted a dark picture of a tribal leader gone mad. Similarly, Kurtz in the book “Heart of Darkness”…

In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Marlow’s preconceived notion of the naïve and sheltered woman is revealed early in the novel: “It’s queer how out of touch with truth women are! They live in a world of their own and there had never been anything like it and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether,…

Early on in Marlow’s journey to the heart of the Congo, he encounters the chief accountant for the Company; later, he and his crew find an abandoned hut, formerly occupied by a “white man.” In these two scenes, Conrad puts forth a series of contrasts that resonate with larger themes in the text: his philosophies…

At the crux of Heart of Darkness lies a psychological and physical odyssey towards the confronting and profound realities of colonialism. Through constructing a complex tale based on opposites: civilised versus savagery, a core of faith and belief versus hollowness, self-restraint and its lack, Joseph Conrad reveals that behind the rhetoric of civilisation lies an…

Joseph Conrad’s writing has captivated millions with its vast voyages with places far away, sojourners in distant lands, and an omnipotent force of nature disrupting everything. The concept of writing about seafaring comes directly from Conrad’s own adventures, as he went on many voyages throughout his life. Whether intentionally or not, Conrad’s personal understanding of…

Constructing a narrative to impose order on an unfamiliar idea or place is a natural human impulse. Designed to change Raw realities…from free-floating objects into units of knowledge (Said 67), narratives about the strange, the unreal, and the newly discovered inevitably arise. Equally inevitable is that fact that these narratives theories, novels, descriptions, or whatever…

The enigma of adventure literature and hyper-masculine prose reveals itself when the protagonist or a subordinate character cowers in the face of darkness. The unknown strikes the heart of man and satiates his inner desire to meet a force grander than he. The darkness, not frightening in and of itself, is frightening because it conceals…

Blanchot’s view of the status of the narrative voice is very pertinent to any discussion of Heart of Darkness. ‘Something indeterminate’ and ‘spectral’ implies a lack of stability and centrality which is rendered strongly in the novel by the use of multiple narrators within a frame narrative structure. This essay will explore each narrative layer…

In Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, Mr. Kurtz’s chilling final words reveal his epiphany about the true nature of man. He has come to realize that the flickering light of his own morals could not overcome the darkness of his human nature. By weaving images of dark and light throughout the book, Conrad gives…