The setting of Heart of Darkness is a very critical part of the book, and Conrad goes to extreme lengths to highlight the evil radiating from the region in which he sets his book. First, the tale is told in a frame story pattern, Marlow is relating his experience to friends in a setting different from that of the primary tale. But the setting where Marlow tells his tale is a foreshadow of what is to come. Marlow presents his story on a boat in the dark of night, creating a sense of evil surrounding the story. The darkness is so deep where Marlow rests during the telling of his tale, that he cannot see his friends, and instead tells the story to the darkness itself. Once the narrative begins, Conrad quickly places his character in another situation which only foretells of the place to which he is going. Within a Belgian office, Marlow examines a map of the area into which he is traveling, he describes it,
“…on one end a large shining map, marked with all the colours of a rainbow. There was a vast amount of red-good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there, a deuce of a lot of blue, a little green, smears of orange, and, on the…
… middle of paper …
…s us human, but we must always understand that it is only a mask, and not the truth, because one day everyone will be faced with the darkness of the true nature of our world, and we will stare into the heart of the darkness, and it will break us, as it did to Kurtz, or enlighten us, as it did to Marlow.
Works Cited and Consulted
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. New Jersey: The Ecco Press, 1992.
Guerard, Albert J. Conrad the Novelist. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard U. Press, 1958.
Guerard, Albert J. “Heart of Darkness”. TCLC. 13:114.
Karl, Fredrick R. “Heart of Darkness”. TCLC. 6:121.
Kimbrough, Robert, ed. Heart of Darkness: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Sources, Criticism. By Joseph Conrad. 3rd ed.
Norton Critical Edition. New York: Norton, 1988.
Meyers, Jeffrey. Joseph Conrad. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1991.
Confronting Fear in Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now
Confronting Fear in Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now
Inherent inside every human soul is a savage evil side that remains repressed by society. Often this evil side breaks out during times of isolation from our culture, and whenever one culture confronts another. History is loaded with examples of atrocities that have occurred when one culture comes into contact with another. Whenever fundamentally different cultures meet, there is often a fear of contamination and loss of self that leads us to discover more about our true selves, often causing perceived madness by those who have yet to discover.
The Puritans left Europe in hopes of finding a new world to welcome them and their beliefs. What they found was a vast new world, loaded with Indian cultures new to them. This overwhelming cultural interaction caused some Puritans to go mad and try to purge themselves of a perceived evil. This came to be known as the Salem witch trials.
During World War II, Germany made an attempt to overrun Europe. What happened when the Nazis came into power and persecuted the Jews in Germany, Austria and Poland is well known as the Holocaust. Here, human’s evil side provides one of the scariest occurrences of this century. Adolf Hitler and his Nazi counterparts conducted raids of the ghettos to locate and often exterminate any Jews they found. Although Jews are the most widely known victims of the Holocaust, they were not the only targets. When the war ended, 6 million Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Communists, and others targeted by the Nazis, had died in the Holocaust. Most of these deaths occurred in gas chambers and mass shootings. This gruesome attack was motivated mainly by the fear of cultural intermixing which would impurify the “Master Race.”
Joseph Conrad’s book, The Heart of Darkness and Francis Coppola’s movie, Apocalypse Now are both stories about Man’s journey into his self, and the discoveries to be made there. They are also about Man confronting his fears of failure, insanity, death, and cultural contamination.
During Marlow’s mission to find Kurtz, he is also trying to find himself. He, like Kurtz had good intentions upon entering the Congo. Conrad tries to show us that Marlow is what Kurtz had been, and Kurtz is what Marlow could become. Every human has a little of Marlow and Kurtz in them. Marlow says about himself, “I was getting savage (Conrad),” meaning that he was becoming more like Kurtz.