Without personal access to authors, readers are left to themselves to interpret literature. This can become challenging with more difficult texts, such as Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness. Fortunately, literary audiences are not abandoned to flounder in pieces such as this; active readers may look through many different lenses to see possible meanings in a work. For example, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness may be deciphered with a post-colonial, feminist, or archetypal mindset, or analyzed with Freudian psycho-analytic theory. The latter two would effectively reveal the greater roles of Kurtz and Marlow as the id and the ego, respectively, and offer the opportunity to draw a conclusion about the work as a whole. Sigmund Freud’s …show more content…
His European-influenced judgements of many of the things he sees – such as the valley of death, where Marlow stands “horror-struck” (Conrad 84), and the pilgrims’ “little fun” with the Winchesters as the boat departs Kurtz’s Inner Station – are not shared by anyone around him (151). His active super-ego allows Marlow to impose European moral codes over himself in and his perceptions of Africa. Others, all of whom lack such a faculty, lost when they entered Africa what civilization they possessed in Europe. Throughout his time in Africa, Marlow is able to adhere to the demands of his super-ego, and this affects his friends’ perception of him when he returns to England. They are only human, while Marlow seems to have transcended his humanity: he “[sits] apart” from them, “indistinct and silent,” like “a meditating Buddha” (164). His account of the time before his departure for Africa indicates that he too was simply human at that time; he became Buddha-like sometime in the course of his travels. The point of his ascention from humanity is clear when another method of interpretation is applied. When Marlow and Kurtz are viewed as archetypes of the ego and the id, the story as a whole takes on a greater metaphorical meaning. Marlow’s journey is not to Africa; he travels into his own mind, and the forest is his unconscious. Marlow sets out to discover and
"The horror, the horror!" Kurtz exclaims prior to his last breath of life on earth. In those final moments, Kurtz was able to say something so true about the whole mess of human life. A life dominated by the fittest, perceived differently through each human eye, and full of judgement lacking understanding of all sides. The various ways the world is viewed causes many problems amongst its people. Whether they are about racism, wealth, or even common sense, conflicts are still subject to arouse. Why? The answer to this is not yet clear because of its complexity and endless variables. Yet what is clear is that it ties into two other aspects-prejudice and social
A counter-interpretation of Marlow's relationship to colonialism is that he takes an active role in Europe's colonialism of Africa. He talks of how he used to study maps of all the continents when he was younger and wishes to travel to all of them. Marlow says, "We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet." (p. 63) This gives sight into the adventurous nature of Marlow in exploring new places. It shows that Marlow can actually be participating and supporting colonialism with out necessarily believing in enslaving the people of the Exotic lands which are traveled too.
The protagonist Marlow believes that: “the mind of man is capable of anything-because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future” (109). The basis of Heart of Darkness is Marlow's physical journey up the congo river to meet Kurtz. The main character Marlow goes through many physical and psycological changes from the beginning to the end of the story. In the beginning, Marlow is fairly innocent as he goes up the river, he gets closer and closer to Kurtz, and he moves closer and closer he learns more and more about the hearts of men and the darkness. When he eventually reaches Kurtz, Marlow's perception is obstructed and he physically and psychologically, does not know where he is.
As the Heart of Darkness snakes its way into the savage shadows of the African continent, Joseph Conrad exposes a psycho-geography of the collective unconscious in the entangling metaphoric realities of the serpentine Congo. Conrad’s novella descends into the unknowable darkness at the heart of Africa, taking its narrator, Marlow, on an underworld journey of individuation, a modern odyssey toward the center of the Self and the center of the Earth. Ego dissolves into soul as, in the interior, Marlow encounters his double in the powerful image of ivory-obsessed Kurtz, the dark shadow of European imperialism. The dark meditation is graced by personifications of anima in Kurtz’ black goddess, the savagely magnificent consort of the underworld,
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
What makes Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness more than the run of the mill adventure tale, is its moral complexity. By the end of the novel, we find a protagonist who has immense appreciation for a man who lacks honest redemption, the mysterious Mr. Kurtz. It is the literal vivaciousness and unyielding spirit of this man, his pure intentionality, which Marlow finds so entrancing and which leaves the reader with larger questions regarding the human capacity. Therefore, Heart of Darkness is profoundly different given its character complexity and ambiguous narrative technique which ultimately deliver home a message of the complex motivations and capabilities of mankind.
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad is a story about a man named Marlow and his Journey into the African Congo. By reading the novel and understanding all the imagery Conrad has inserted, we can get a better understanding of the
Although the author Joseph Conrad never met the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who died more than a century before Conrad’s birth, their distinct philosophies still have numerous points of intersection, suggesting some fundamental truths within the structure of the human reality. Through the novella, Heart of Darkness, Conrad details his perspectives on the faults of man and reality as a whole, with views often coinciding with many of Leibniz’s own, as found in his numerous philosophical works. Consequently, the two perspectives combine together, like a cyclopean image, to enhance and deepen each of the two men’s philosophies on humanity.
Conrad also implements minor characters to further the unexpected distinction between dark and light, black and white. The white pilgrims are portrayed as materialistic, ivory-hungry opportunists with "black" souls; their behavior is violent and savage. Contrariwise, the black natives are civil, spiritual, and have "white" souls. In the beginning of the novel, Conrad creates the fellow seamen who accompany Marlow on his present journey and listen to his tale of the Congo to establish the contrast between the materialistic and the spiritual. The fellow sailors do not understand Marlow's tale and chastise him throughout, showing their reluctance and inability to
Carl Jung was a pioneer of psychoanalytic theory along with his former partner and mentor, Sigmund Freud. Though Jung split from Freud and diverged onto his own unbeaten trail of psychoanalysis two years before his decease, they are both highly revered for the myriad of ways in which they developed the understanding of the mind. Parallel to this period, Joseph Conrad penned and published the novella Heart of Darkness, which tackled much of what Jung had found about the psyche and its inner workings. In Heart of Darkness, both Marlow and Kurtz are representations of strong reoccurring archetypes within human myth, religion, and folklore. They work together to epitomize one of Jung’s Cores of Personality: the Principle of Opposites. The
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.
In Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, the physical journey that tells the story throughout the book plays a central role as a guide to the overall meaning. The journey adds meaning to the book by using both the literal movement throughout the journey, as well as the themes throughout the book that help tell the story. Three themes that helped shape the movement of the journey include Exploration, Good vs Evil, and lastly, the theme of Uncertainty. All three of these themes add to the journey and help the reader better understand the basis of the book.
The constant change in scenery throughout the Heart of Darkness contributes heavily to the meaning of the novel as a whole, for it allows the novel’s author, Joseph Conrad, to expand on the effects the physical journey of travelling through the Congo has on the inner mentailites of the characters- Marlow and Kurtz- in the novel. Conrad’s continuous comparisons between characters, their surroundings, and the plot, create the genuine progression of the novel, while the physical journey that is taken allows the characters to make their own discovery of humankind. As Kurtz’s destiny and the struggles he overcomes go on to deeply affect the two characters’ journey through the story’s plot, as everything in the Heart of Darkness is linked or comes back to Kurtz and all the wrongful actions he has committed in the Congo- as he was the perpetrator of all the darkness in the novel to begin with.
Marlow is also transformed as he travels into the heart of the jungle. As he follows the river upstream in search of Kurtz, he feels unsettled, yet enlightened, by the events that are unfolding around him, and is forced to reconsider his impression of the Africans. He acknowledges that they are indeed very much human, contrary to what most Europeans assert. "But what thrilled you," Marlow says, "was just the thought of their humanity - like yours - the thought of your remote kinship with" those
The two major themes of Heart of Darkness are the conflict between “reality” and “darkness,” and the idea of restraint and whether or not it is necessary. Conrad’s passage describing the restraint of the hungry cannibals exemplifies both themes: It describes how reality shapes human behavior, and contrasts the characters of Kurtz and Marlow. “Reality,” as it is used here, is defined as “that which is civilized.”