“Do they read Shakespeare?” asked the Savage as they walked, on their way to the Bio-chemical Laboratories, past the School Library. “Certainly not,” said the Head Mistress, blushing.
In Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”, allusions to William Shakespeare and his works emphasize the contrast between the “”Brave New World”” and the world in Shakespeare’s time and even the current time period. Enhancing the work’s meaning, the allusions and character’s reactions to the allusions reveal the positive and negative aspects of our society today.
The main characters in “Brave New World”, Lenina Crowne, Henry Foster, and Bernard Marx, live in a futuristic world where babies are mass produced in laboratories and raised to perform various functions in society. In order to assure community, stability, and identity, the basis of their world, these functions must be met and solitary amusements are discouraged. Inferring that reading Shakespeare is entertaining, people in the “”Brave New World”” have “feelies” to amuse themselves instead. To demonstrate the differenc…
The Role of Marlow as Narrator in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
The Role of Marlow as Narrator in Heart of Darkness
Whether Marlow is, or is not, Conrad has been discussed extensively. Clearly, Marlow is both, at the same time that he is neither. Heart of Darkness is not, then, Marlow’s story exclusively. And if we examine it for a moment as the creation of the nameless member of Marlow’s audience, it takes on a different coloration. The narrator’s inclusion of Marlow’s story within his point of view appears as a deliberate attempt on his part to frame the concrete world and man’s involvement with this world in a vision which negates the reality of both. “Heart of Darkness” creates for us the visible surface of life, but does so in such a way that we never forget that this surface is a lie. It leads us to Kurtz, but does so in such a way that we never accept his idealism at face value. And this destruction of both possible grounds for the self, grounds toward which all versions of the adventure for Conrad are directed, results in the radical transformation in the intent of writing. It is no longer one form of the adventure, an act by which man could assure his positive existence. For the anonymous narrator, writing performs precisely the opposite function. It becomes a way of destroying any idea of an act which can confer such an identity by destroying all belief in a reality toward which this act can be directed.
Thus for the narrator to place Marlow’s positive, creative journey within the context of a negating darkness is for him to accept the insubstantiality of the self. It is to accept the fact that man can never transcend the conditional existence of his original, orphaned state, and it is this acceptance of his own insubstantiality which is the source of the narra…
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…ces on the Thames.(19)
(16) ã The World’s Classics Joseph Conrad. Youth, Heart of Darkness, The End of the Tether. Edited with an introduction by robert Kimbrough. Introduction, Notes, Blossary ã Robert Kimbrough-1984 Pages: 10 and 11.
(17) ã The Metaphysics of Darkness . Royal Roussel. A study in the unity and development of Conrad’s Fiction.
1971- The John’s Hopkins Press by Baltimore and London Pages: 77, 78 and 79.
(18) ã The World’s Classics Joseph Conrad. Youth, Heart of Darkness, The End of the Tether
Edited with an introduction by robert Kimbrough. Introuduction, Notes, Glossary ã Robert Kimbrough- 1984
Pages: 14, 15 and 23.
(19) ã Heart of Darkness with the Congo Diary Introduction and Notes ãRobert Hampson, 1995
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England. Pages: 26 and 27.