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Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is based upon Conrad's own experience as a steamboat captain in the area once known as the Congo. Conrad commanded his ship for a short time when he became ill and...
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Heart of Darkness
In Heart of Darkness, the titular "darkness" represents various parts of reality, human nature, and the corruption of decency when faced with insurmountable obstacles. Marlow uses it regularly both...
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Heart of Darkness
In Heart of Darkness, female characters play a stereotypical role and appear quite infrequently. Only a few women appear at all, and they serve as elements of contrast for Marlow. The Black...
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Heart of Darkness
When writing a response to the first part of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, you might want to try answering a few different questions first: Where is the story set? Who are the characters so...
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Heart of Darkness
The frame story, in which the world-weary Marlow tells his story to a group of sailors, creates a disconnect between the essential story itself and the reader. The unnamed narrator only interrupts...
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Heart of Darkness
Conrad's masterpiece takes special cases of morality as one of its central themes. The company is symbolic of a special case of morality, meaning it is an entity that defines a set of moral rules...
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Heart of Darkness
Kurtz is the symbol of colonialism in this novel. As Marlowe states: All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz. Colonialism involves the appropriation of another group of people and their...
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Heart of Darkness
Heart of Darkness develops a journey motif, and one of the journeys Marlow undertakes is a "night journey" into what has been called the primal self. He leaves London seeking knowledge of himself,...
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Heart of Darkness
This is a really interesting question—this particular quotation from the story has been much discussed and held up as an example of a particularly "Conradian" style of writing. The critic F.R....
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Heart of Darkness
There are a number of external conflicts in Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. A primary one is the conflict between the traders from The Company and the people in the Congo. The Congolese people...
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Heart of Darkness
The company is Marlow's employer, of course, but also represents the power of European colonialism in Africa. The company's business is to extract as much ivory from the jungle as possible; it is...
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Heart of Darkness
In Heart of Darkness, Polish-English novelist Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) draws from his own experience in Africa; he once piloted a Belgian steamboat on a trading mission that took him through...
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Heart of Darkness
Impressionistic literature can be defined as a work created by an author that centers on the thinking and feelings of the characters and allows the reader to draw his or her own interpretations and...
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Heart of Darkness
The two characters of Kurtz and Marlow are curiously interlinked in this book. Marlow is shown to have a somewhat supernatural fascination with Kurtz from the first moment he hears about him, and...
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Heart of Darkness
The Nigerian author Chinua Achebe criticized Joseph Conrad's novel, Heart of Darkness, as being racist. He did so in a lecture, later published, at the University of Massachusetts entitled An Image...
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Heart of Darkness
In Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Kurtz can be seen as something of a tragic hero. It's suggested that his original intentions were relatively honorable, and so his eventual decline into...
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Heart of Darkness
Conrad explores the corruption of the human soul primarily through the characterization of Kurtz. Kurtz develops megalomania during his time in the heart of the Congo, which was being pillaged by...
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Heart of Darkness
In Heart of Darkness, Mr. Kurtz is a symbol of how colonialism changes the colonizers as well as the colonized. It is an illustration of the law of compensation which Ralph Waldo Emerson deals with...
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Heart of Darkness
Everything that is happening in the Congo stems from the ivory trade. I believe this passage comes toward the end of the story in talking about Kurtz and his compound. Kurtz has fallen victim to...
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Heart of Darkness
Marlow has experienced a vast change in his character, and his contemplation of the similar effects on the Romans who might have landed on British shores spurs him to tell his story to the others...
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Heart of Darkness
As Kurtz nears death, Marlow finds himself more and more fascinated by what Kurtz has to say, and by his past in the jungle. Marlow believes that the jungle has destroyed whatever was truly human...
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Heart of Darkness
When Marlow travels to the Congo, he takes a boat up the big river and, after a few miles, arrives at a place where men are building the railway. The horrible sight of the workers’ poor health...
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Heart of Darkness
Given that Conrad was writing in the heyday of British colonialism, it is rather staggering the kind of criticism that he levels at colonialism in general in this powerful novella. Conrad uses...
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Heart of Darkness
In Joseph Conrad's novel, Heart of Darkness, the pilgrims are not slaves. First of all, the black men who are slaves are shackled together. Marlow first sees this vision of "hell" at the Lower...
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Heart of Darkness
Marlow's statement reveals his beliefs about the existential and political condition of human beings. This condition of human beings that "live in the flicker" helps to convey their temporal...
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Heart of Darkness
In Section Two, when Marlow hears the "native howl and leap", the believes they are not all that different from himself. They seem to share some sort of "remote kinship". Then...
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Heart of Darkness
While there are many labels that can be applied to Kurtz and what was done to different areas of the world under colonization, there was a sense of adventure present. Marlow has to find Kurtz...
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Heart of Darkness
To me one example of the kind of imagery you are referring to is when Marlow arrives at the Outer Station, and sees what he calls "the grove of death" and then meets the Accountant. Note his...
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Heart of Darkness
While the central story of Heart of Darkness is told by Marlow, a long-time sailor, it is in the form of an anecdote told to an unnamed Narrator, who frames the story with their voyage on the...
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Heart of Darkness
Marlow mentions that Kurtz is a "universal genius" in the conversation that he has with Kurtz's cousin after Kurtz has died. Marlow is in the "sepulchral city," where the company's management is...
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Heart of Darkness
I think that it is deliberate on Conrad's part to not give us a point of view where psychological totality is present. In my mind, one of Conrad's fundamental points in his novel is the danger that...
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Heart of Darkness
Heart of Darkness is a 1899 novella written by famed Polish-British author Joseph Conrad, which was originally published as a three-part serial story. The novella has a very unique narrative...
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Heart of Darkness
Marlow must steer the boat upriver to try to reach Kurtz, but he is unfamiliar with the river and is especially concerned about the hidden dangers below. He knows that any idea of control is just...
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Heart of Darkness
We don't really know what causes his physical illness; we can assume that he has caught malaria or is suffering from some other fever illness. However, he has looked into the depth of his soul...
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Heart of Darkness
This is a great question, and to answer it we need to think very carefully about what Conrad wanted to achieve through his choice of how he told the story. The beginning and the end of the novel,...
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Heart of Darkness
Marlow's change is more obvious, since he is relating the story and explaining how his views became altered. He started as a hard-working, young man, without existential worries or fear of...
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Heart of Darkness
First of all, Marlow is surprised that even though the cannibals have run out of food, they do not attack and eat the white men aboard the boat--amazing, he thinks, because the cannibals definitely...
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Heart of Darkness
Since Marlow is narrating the story himself, much of the narration is styled to sound like a running monologue; he stops, goes back, remembers disconnected information and repeats himself. One...
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Heart of Darkness
The irony in both stories is that the more powerful characters, the “creators,” are not strong enough to survive the situations they have created for themselves. In each story, we have a...
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Heart of Darkness
Roland Barthes's "The Death of the Author" argues that the author's biographical context has no bearing on the story being told. In other words, that the author and the story are completely...
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Heart of Darkness
One way in which both of these excellent novels can be considered to be similar is the way in which they both, to varying degrees, attack the central notion of imperialism that lies on the belief...
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Heart of Darkness
Conrad's use of two narrators in Heart of Darknessreinforces several of the novella's themes. The bulk of the narrative is told by Charlie Marlow about his experiences in traveling up the Congo...
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Heart of Darkness
The Russian, also known as the harlequin because of his clothing, makes these remarks in a conversation with Marlow when Marlow is asking about the heads on stakes at Kurtz's compound. The Russian,...
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Heart of Darkness
Conrad was very interested in the contrast of “the raw and the cooked,” that is, the civilized vs. the primitive (Claude Levi-Strauss’ metaphor for the two stages of civilization). The whole...
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Heart of Darkness
There are so many interpretations of this quotation! Here are a few that I find most plausible. By the end of his long stay at the inner station, Kurtz has realized that his treatment of the...
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Heart of Darkness
At the beginning of Heart of Darkness, Marlow is talking about the Romans. He talks about how the Romans were nothing but thieves and murderers. They were unable to actually rule other peoples....
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Heart of Darkness
Because of the high profitability and difficult work of hunting ivory in the jungle, men who could command respect and power were well-suited to lead hunting teams. However, Kurtz's original intent...
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Heart of Darkness
The narrator uses the term kernel to refer to how Marlow tells a story and what interests him in a story. The kernel is the center of the story but what interests Marlow is not only the center...
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Heart of Darkness
I think you are correct. The climax comes when Kurtz dies---leaving the mystery to what he means by "the horror, the horror." Kurtz had "stepped over the edge" while Marlow has...
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Heart of Darkness
This is a great question! One of the central differences to me is how they are described and depicted. One of the first things that strikes Marlow when he sees the Russian is his resemblance to a...
