Heart of Darkness

A great story includes characters, plot, and other literary components (from Ch. 26, SKILLS FOR LITERARY ANALYSIS). It also has profound and eternal meeting. Its meaning, or theme, should transcend time and location. The following is a paper written on one theme in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In this book the thoughtful protagonist Marlow is looking for the idealistic Kurtz who has disappeared while trying to enlighten the natives in Africa.

One evening coming in with a candle I was startled to hear him say a little tremulously, “I am lying here in the dark wishing for death.” The light was with in a foot of his eyes. I forced myself to murmur, “Oh, nonsense!” and stood over him as if transfixed. Anything approaching the change that comes over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn’t touched. I was fascinated. It was though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of somber pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror-of and intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision- he cried out twice, a cry that was not more than a breath: `The horror! The horror!’

The adventuresome protagonist Marlow found the lost Kurtz, only to lose him again on his deathbed. Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad, has many different themes. One theme Conrad develops was a suspicion of modernity, a world view that argued that science and human knowledge could solve most anything.

Joseph Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness in the early 19th century when western culture was full of optimism. The Industrial Revolution was well underway, advances had occurred in medicine, and the horseless carriage–the automobile–was even devdeveloped. Human ingenuity and progress seemed to have no end! . Conrad, a Polish-born English novelist, in Heart of Darkness, in particular, we see Conrad exhibiting the vulnerability, limits, and flaws of human knowledge.

Heart of Darkness is a story that takes place in the mind of the protagonist, Charlie Marlow. Charlie Marlow, a young man who wants an adventure, sets off with money from an aunt to the Congo River. He hears rumors of a man named Kurtz. Kurt, a missionary, has disappeared into the jungle-wilderness of interior Congo. Marlowe is first fascinated, and then obsessed with Kurtz. Like most modern men, enthralled with knowledge, Marlowe desperately wants, or needs, to find him, and talk with him. He wants to know why he disappeared and why. He is on a modern, Hegleian search for truth–truth that arises from the struuggle. This search, however, takes Marlowe where he scarcely wished to go.

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