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A review by erinwilham
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
3.0
In writing Heart of Darkness, author Joseph Conrad's purpose is to show that everyone is capable through circumstance of evil. As captain of a steamship in a Belgian ivory trading company, the protagonist, Marlow, travels up the Congo River into the interior of Africa. During his journey, he witnesses the brutal treatment of the native Africans there by the men of the Company that he is working for. The descent of Kurtz into madness and death is a result of his greed and obsession with the ivory trade. He makes himself into a god of the native people so that they will help him acquire more ivory, but he ends up becoming more "savage" than the natives themselves by keeping shrunken heads on poles and brutalizing the people for ivory (28).
The overall theme of Heart of Darkness is the relativity of evil. Marlow, who is described as heroic and compassionate toward the native Africans, is forced to choose between two evils in the novel. He can either work for the imperial Company, which is hypocritical and power-hungry, or he can align himself with Kurtz, who poses as a god to the natives and impales shrunken heads with poles. In either case, he would be associating himself with evil, but it would be more acceptable for him to go with the Company in the society he comes from. The Company represents the civilized Western world, while Kurtz comes to represent the savage African world. Conrad shows that there is really no difference between the two, because in the end we are all just as capable of moral wrongdoing.
Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness as a frame narrative. As the story starts out, the anonymous narrator is sitting with three other men on a British ship called the Nelly, when the protagonist, Marlow, begins to tell the story of his journey to Africa. After this point, Marlow only rarely interrupts his story in order to make an important point, such as when he interrupts to comment on the power of Kurtz's voice in one point of the story before he had even heard him talk (18). Conrad's style of writing was effective because it allows him to give an accurate description of the protagonist, who is characterized by the narrator as possessing many traditional heroic qualities, such as strength and honesty.
Heart of Darkness was not one of my favorite books, but overall I was glad that I read it. At some points when I was reading I felt that he was relying too much on metaphors and it seemed that he was overusing them, but these also added to the meaning of the book at the same time. For example, the biggest metaphor of the book is the "heart of darkness," which comes to represent the evil that is inside of everyone, and is capable of pronouncing itself if one loses self-control. One thing that Conrad did that I thought was interesting was deliberately using prejudices against both colored people and women. I think he depicted the Africans as savages and women as idealistic and naive in order to show that in spite of our supposed differences, we are really all the same as part of human nature.
The overall theme of Heart of Darkness is the relativity of evil. Marlow, who is described as heroic and compassionate toward the native Africans, is forced to choose between two evils in the novel. He can either work for the imperial Company, which is hypocritical and power-hungry, or he can align himself with Kurtz, who poses as a god to the natives and impales shrunken heads with poles. In either case, he would be associating himself with evil, but it would be more acceptable for him to go with the Company in the society he comes from. The Company represents the civilized Western world, while Kurtz comes to represent the savage African world. Conrad shows that there is really no difference between the two, because in the end we are all just as capable of moral wrongdoing.
Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness as a frame narrative. As the story starts out, the anonymous narrator is sitting with three other men on a British ship called the Nelly, when the protagonist, Marlow, begins to tell the story of his journey to Africa. After this point, Marlow only rarely interrupts his story in order to make an important point, such as when he interrupts to comment on the power of Kurtz's voice in one point of the story before he had even heard him talk (18). Conrad's style of writing was effective because it allows him to give an accurate description of the protagonist, who is characterized by the narrator as possessing many traditional heroic qualities, such as strength and honesty.
Heart of Darkness was not one of my favorite books, but overall I was glad that I read it. At some points when I was reading I felt that he was relying too much on metaphors and it seemed that he was overusing them, but these also added to the meaning of the book at the same time. For example, the biggest metaphor of the book is the "heart of darkness," which comes to represent the evil that is inside of everyone, and is capable of pronouncing itself if one loses self-control. One thing that Conrad did that I thought was interesting was deliberately using prejudices against both colored people and women. I think he depicted the Africans as savages and women as idealistic and naive in order to show that in spite of our supposed differences, we are really all the same as part of human nature.