Analysis: Joseph Conrad's The Lagoon

Life is the journey, the inevitable journey, and the experiences thoughout life, the journeys within the journey, are the planned and unplanned experiences that change people and are a huge part of a person’s moral and personal growth. In the novella “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad, the physical journey through the Congo is parallel to the inner journey of the main character Marlow. Similarly, the poem “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost, relates on both a literal and metaphoric level to the concept of a journey. The individuals’ creation of their own direction on a journey is

In the novel Longboat Bay are the starting and the main setting. The characters Abel and his mother Dora lives on the land of Longboat Bay. The lands have been the Jacksons land for more than a century and have been taking care of it since now. Abel lives in a place with no main electricity from the city and no water except rainwater. The land around them is a national park and behind the house is the orchard. This is shown in the quote “and all the land around them was a national park.” And “there were orange and lemon trees in the orchard as well as olives and mulberries.” The sea is “rich in life” and the author invites the reader to want to care for the sea. This technique shows the beauty of the sea and the land around it.

    Literature is never interpreted in exactly the same way by two different readers. A prime example of a work of literature that is very ambiguous is Joseph Conrad's, "Heart of Darkness". The Ambiguities that exist in this book are Marlow's relationship to colonialism, Marlow's changing feelings toward Kurtz, and Marlow's lie to the Intended at the end of the story.

For this essay I will analyze the unnamed narrator whom is the protagonist in the story. The story opens up with the narrator describing

Kate Chopin and T. Coraghessan Boyle made excellent use of the elements point of view, character, and setting in their short stories “The Storm” and “Greasy Lake”. Kate Chopin’s characters and events follow the setting—the storm. This greatly enhances her work. Boyle’s characters mirror his setting as well—a greasy lake. It is amazing how much greater depth and deeper the insight is for a story when the potentials of elements of writing are fulfilled and utilized.

At a young age, Jeannette’s experience with fire has showed her that the world is full of danger. She sees that the world “at any moment could erupt into fire.” Jeannette’s thought of “if the fire had been out to get me”, shows that she believes fire is a reoccurrence in her life. The element of fire serves as a symbol of how one misfortune event is connected to another in Jeannette’s childhood, like the way “all fire was related.” It also foreshadows that Peace for Jeannette only lasts momentarily. Throughout the story, Jeannette and her family encountered countless struggles. However, these struggles had trained Jeannette and her siblings to be strong individuals. It also required the children to take care of each other and appreciate what

It is a fabulous place: when the tide is in, a wave-churned basin, creamy with foam, whipped by the combers that roll in from the whistling buoy on the reef. But when the tide goes out the little water world becomes quiet and lovely. The sea is very clear and the bottom becomes fantastic with hurrying, fighting, feeding, breeding animals”(57)

There is an abundance of literature in which characters become caught between colliding cultures. Often, these characters experience a period of growth from their exposure to a culture that’s dissimilar to their own. Such is the case with Marlow, Joseph Conrad’s infamous protagonist from ‘Heart of Darkness’. Marlow sets off to Africa on an ivory conquest and promptly found himself sailing into the heart of the Congo River. Along the way he is faced with disgruntled natives, cannibals, and the ominous and foreboding landscape. Marlow’s response to these tribulations is an introspective one, in which he calls into question his identity. This transcending of his former self renders the work as a whole a

In “Marlow’s Quest,” Jerome Thale writes that Heart of Darkness has all the “trappings of the conventional adventure tale” and that the protagonist, Marlow, is “like a knight seeking the grail, and his journey even to the end follows the archetype” (Thale 176). Indeed, Conrad’s novel meets these tropes and fits this pattern, however, such a reading only meets the novel at its most superficial level and even Thale goes on to note the deeper complexity within Marlow’s quest. The archetype of the adventure novel is the template from which Conrad works from. He builds his premise on “the hero’s journey,” which Joseph Campbell defines as:

Inherent inside every human soul is a savage evil side that remains repressed by society. Often this evil side breaks out during times of isolation from our culture, and whenever one culture confronts another. History is loaded with examples of atrocities that have occurred when one culture comes into contact with another. Whenever fundamentally different cultures meet, there is often a fear of contamination and loss of self that leads us to discover more about our true selves, often causing perceived madness by those who have yet to discover their own self.  Joseph Conrad’s book, The Heart of Darkness is a story about Man’s journey into his self, the discoveries to be made there and about

Short stories can share themes, motifs, symbols, consequences, and plot lines, even if there is never any intention to share a common element between the stories. The stories can be written close together or in different decades and still be linked to the one another. They can also be worlds apart with different meanings in the end, but that does not stop them from having similar ideas expressed within them. The following three stories, “Lagoon” by Joseph Conrad, “The Rocking Horse Winner” by DH Lawrence, and “The Lady in the Looking Glass” by Virginia Woolf, are three totally different stories that share common threads that make them the stories that they are.

Beyond the shield of civilization and into the depths of a primitive, untamed frontier lies the true face of the human soul. It is in the midst of this savagery and unrelenting danger that mankind confronts the brooding nature of his inner self.  Joseph Conrad’s novel, Heart of Darkness, is the story of one man's insight into life as he embarks on a voyage to the edges of the world. Here, he meets the bitter, yet enlightening forces that eventually shape his outlook on life and his own individuality. Conrad’s portrayal of the characters, setting, and symbols, allow the reader to reflect on the true nature of man.

became contaminated and along with that the birds left that area. In the Chapter, Carson

Heart of Darkness is written by Joseph Conrad and published in 1899. It is a novella written in the early modernism literary period.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “The Handsomest Drowned Man In The World” achieves powerfully fantastic story-telling. As the story begins, we are met with the discovery of a floating corpse at sea that shores itself on an unassuming village’s beach. The drowned man is not of the village, which quickly piques the villagers curiosities. The villagers acknowledged him as a stranger among them, “…when they found the drowned man they simply had to look at one another to see that they were all there.” No one had seen him before.