Category: Heart of Darkness

The late 19th and early 20th centuries marked a time of empire-building for much of Europe. In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad deals with one specific problem of European hegemony-the treatment of natives. Critics accuse Conrad of holding colonial bias in his writings, stereotyping “savage” natives and glorifying “benevolent” Europeans. Indeed, Conrad’s main character and…

In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the narrator is obsessed with a search for the meaning of everything he sees. Marlow, thrust into a new continent, is overwhelmed by its foreignness and his inability to understand his surroundings. The meaning that he seeks he expects to find in explanations and tries to relate in his…

The most nefarious villains are those who understand the evil they commit but pay no heed. In Heart of Darkness, however, the major villain, Kurtz, is not one of these characters. More than anything, he is depicted as being helpless in the face of a greater force which compels him to act in a depraved…

In Heart of Darkness, Marlow, in explaining his motivations for venturing into the Belgian Congo, first, almost by way of an apology, draws on the common spirit of adventure shared by boyhood readers of adventure novels; he names a childhood “passion for maps.” His desire for the journey originates in an urge for discovering the…

Two orphaned boys grow up to be politically-concerned authors, one a poet and one a novelist, who use their maritime literature to speak out against the prevailing ills of European society, specifically the wrongful treatment of African people. These are only a few of the similarities between the lives and works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge…

Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ is not merely “the story of a journey up a river,” but rather an insightful psychological study into the human condition and the hidden nature of mankind conveyed in the form of a narrative. Conrad explores his perception of the human psyche through the concept of ‘restraint’ and the ironic…

Smith asseverates that she has “tried to show the utility for imperialist ideology of a gender ideology that constructs a feminine sphere as ‘too beautiful altogether’” (Smith183). She presents her thesis through an engagement with feminist “rethinking” , successfully noting the binary relationship between men and women. This paper pares down Smith’s argument into its…

When freed from the moral manacles of society, humans must embrace moderate, disciplined lifestyles in order to avoid a fatal plunge into barbarism. In William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, marooned schoolboys exchange the confines of civility for an unrestrained, iniquitous lifestyle. Joseph Conrad depicts a steamboat captain’s voyage down the Congo River and realization…

“Heart of Darkness” is complex tale constructed through dichotomies of light versus darkness, a core of faith and belief versus hollowness, civilisation versus wilderness. Conrad, whilst purposefully introduces these contrasting binaries, he ultimately dismantles them, eliciting parallels between the civilised and primordial, bringing the duplicities of the colonial rhetoric to the foreground. The Biblical allusion…

In “Heart of Darkness”, Conrad distances himself from the eurocentrism of the 19th century, offering a view of scepticism over dogmatic belief in the duplicities of colonial rhetoric. Through this, Conrad subtly undermines the claim of the colonial conquest as an agent of progress and ‘forerunner of change’. Conrad reveals the colonial enterprise as an…