preview

journeyhod In Quest of Self in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness

Better Essays

In Quest of Self in Heart of Darkness

In Conrad's Heart of Darkness Marlow comes to the Congo for experience and self in the ancient belief that a man is shaped by what he does, that character is formed by what happens to one. But surrounding all of man's efforts in the Congo is a presence: Kurtz listened to it and went mad, and Marlow recognizes it but refuses to listen, neutralizes the appeal of the unknown and survives Kurtz, who succumbed to the fascinating wilderness.

In 1899, eleven years earlier than "The Secret Sharer," Conrad published Heart of Darkness, the tale that "delineates the archetypal pattern he continued to refine through his career" (Andreach,1970:44). In this obscure story, he wants to …show more content…

The heart of darkness evoked by Conrad is hard to understand, since the story has different levels: instead of concentrating on the account of the events, the reader has to observe the effects which the re-creation of the narrative produces on the narrator, Marlow, since "recent criticism has insisted on the story's being about Marlow, rather than Kurtz, regarding it as a journey into Marlow's consciousness." (Kirschner, 1968:47) Thus, although Marlow does not want to bother his audience with what happened to him personally, "yet to understand the effect of it on me you ought to know how I got out there, what I saw, how I went up that river to the place where I first met the poor chap." (p.5) For this reason, the main purpose of this paper is to look for the clues which can illustrate those changes produced on Marlow by the events which take place while penetrating into the heart of darkness.

Marlow's story -- which starts after a kind of frame-narrator, employing the first person plural, has already introduced us into the narrative--tells us how he had a passion for maps since he was a little boy:

"I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth...by this time it was not a blank space any more...It had ceased to be a blank space of

Get Access