Elizabeth Underwood

Period 5

 

1.       Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.

2.       The novella starts out with the narrator sitting on a ship with Marlow, a lawyer, an accountant, and the Director of Companies, and then Marlow starts to tell about his past experience on the Congo River as a steamboat captain. Marlow talks about going to the Company’s office to sign up for the position, meeting with the doctor that measures his head, and then thanks his aunt for finding him the job before heading off to Africa.  Marlow travels along the coast of Africa before reaching the Company station where he meets the Chief Accountant, who is the first to mention Kurtz, and then begins his journey on the river.  He finally reaches the Central Station after walking two hundred miles to find that the ship he is to command sunk, possibly on purpose, and no one is willing to fix it any time soon.  As he is waiting for his ship to be repaired, Marlow overhears the manager of the station and his uncle talking about Kurtz and the Russian trader, but not long after his ship is fixed and he is on his way along the river. Along the way Marlow picks up wood the Russian trader has left, and not long after natives, who kill the helmsman in the fight, attack them, but Marlow scares them off with the ship’s whistle.  Marlow throws the body of the helmsman overboard, disappointing both pilgrims and cannibals, before the ship continues on and eventually reaches the inner station and Marlow meets the Russian trader.  Marlow and the Russian talk about Kurtz before the Pilgrims bring Kurtz, who is deathly sick, onto the ship to prepare to bring him back.  Kurtz, that night, escapes off the boat and is pursued by Marlow, who convinces Kurtz to forget the natives and come back with him.  As they travel back down the river, Kurtz’s illness grows worse until he finally dies, and not long after Marlow also becomes ill.  Marlow barely survives his illness, and when he is healthy again he returns to England and meets with a representative of the Company, Kurtz’s cousin, and a journalist before he leaves to meet with Kurtz’s intended.  This ends Marlow’s tale and the narrator looks off into “the heart of an immense darkness”.

3.       Marlow- the main character of the story and is telling his tale of his time on the Congo River in Africa to his friends in England.  He is the captain on the steamboat. 

Kurtz- works for the Company and gathers lots of ivory.  Not many people like him and he is the leader of a tribe that lives around his station.  He dies at the end of the book. 

4.        Themes:

Imperialism induces madness- this is an important theme because Conrad is showing how imperialism isn’t helping or doing good it is simply a waste. 

“Once a white man in a unbuttoned uniform…was looking after the upkeep of the road he declared.  Can’t say I saw any road or any upkeep, unless the body of a middle-aged Negro…may be considered as a permanent improvement” (17).

“A horn tooted to the right, and I saw the black people run.  A heavy and dull detonation shook the ground, a puff of smoke came out of the cliff, and that was all.  No changed appeared on the face of the rock.  They were building a railway.” (12)

“We came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast.  There wasn’t even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush” (11).

Ridiculousness of Evil- this is a theme because throughout the novella Marlow has to decide between two evils, imperialism and Kurtz.

“They were dying slowly—it was very clear.  They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now, nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation” is the evil of the company.

“To speak plainly, he [Kurtz] raided the country” (51)

“They would have been even more impressive, those heads on the stakes, if their faces had not been turned to the house” (52)

Idleness causes madness- this is also an important theme because this is the sold reason Marlow doesn’t fall into darkness as well. 

“ You wonder I didn’t go ashore for a howl and a dance? …I had no time.  I had to mess about with white lead and strips of woolen blanket helping to put bandages of those leaky steam pipes” (32)

“There was surface truth enough in these things to save a wiser man” (33)

“Everything else in the station was in a muddle—heads, things, buildings” (15)

5.   Conrad uses fog to enhance the feeling of darkness, when Marlow’s steamer is caught in fog, he has no idea where he is or where he is going, so the fog is an effect of darkness in the story. Conrad also displays all the women in the story as naïve and they only reflect their man’s wealth.  The Congo River is also a symbol in the novella; it slowly brings Marlow closer to the heart of darkness and swiftly carries him out at the end.  The story is told in first person, a narrator’s point of view listening to Marlow, and it gives the reader a better understanding of what is going on in the story.

6.   A.  The Tone is harsh and meticulous, like Marlow doesn’t expect the reader to understand, in fact he tells the reader he doesn’t expect them to understand, “You can’t understand.  How could you?”  (44)

B.      The diction is wordy, long vocabulary words and the paragraphs contain more description than plot, for example:  “In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red cluster of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits” (1)

C.      The imagery is heavily detailed with gloom, decay, and waste.  “Black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom” (14)

D.      The structure of the text is Marlow telling the story to his friends on a boat and everything has already happened so he always alludes to what will happen in the future, for example:   “I wouldn’t have mentioned the fellow to you at all, only it was from his lips that I first heard the name of the man who is so indissolubly connected with the memories of that time” (15)

7.  Heart of Darkness should be included on “works of high literary merit” because the novella contains one of the first psychological penetrations of a character (Marlow and Kurtz), tons of themes and symbolism, and opened the eyes of the people back in the civilized world what happened in the jungles of Africa. 

8.  I enjoyed the story Heart of Darkness and reading about what happened in during the age of Imperialism, but at times I thought it was a bit wordy and I had to stumble around in paragraphs to find out what was happening between the graphic descriptions, sometimes Marlow reminded me of Frankenstein because of that.