Heart of Darkness; Joseph Conrad

STUDY AND ANALYSIS ON HEART OF DARKNESS
−Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad, can be classified as a novella. A novella is a half−way between the
novel and what we know as short story, in length and scope
−Heart of Darkness has its first narrator in the first person plural, and he's a not named narrator. The main
narrator, which is introduced by this first one, is Marlow, a framed narrator. He's a first person singular
narrator, a kind of narrator−witness sometimes, and moreover, he's one of the main characters. The way he
tells the story is a very descriptive one. His narration is interrupted by himself only three times all along the
novel.
−This novella has a tripartite structure. Moreover, the structure of Heart of Darkness is much like that of the
Russian nesting dolls, where you open each doll up, and there is another doll inside. Much of the mean of
Heart of Darkness is found not in the center of the book, the heart of Africa, but on the periphery of the book:
in what happens to Marlow in Brussels, what is happening on the Nellie as Marlow tells the story, and what
happens to the reader as they read the book.
−The three times Marlow breaks his story, added to the three parts into which the novella has been divided,
the fact of there are three central characters −the narrator, Marlow and Kurtz− and the appearance of three
characters that are women −Aunt, Mistress and Intended−, make us think that there is a three's pattern in this
novella.
−Heart of Darkness setting begins firstly at the River Thames, but the story that Marlow tells is set firstly in
Brussels, and afterwards in a river of the Belgian Congo, even though Marlow never gives those names, but
he makes the reader suppose that he is referring to those places.
−The time of the novella is present as Marlow tells the story, but he is referring to the past. The facts narrated
happen at the late part of the nineteenth century.
*Heart of Darkness provides a bridge between Victorian values and the ideals of modernism. Like other
Victorian novels, this one relies on traditional ideas of heroism, which is nevertheless under constant attack in
a changing world and in places far from England.
Like much of the best modernist literature produced in the early decades of the twentieth century, Heart of
Darkness is much about confusion, profound doubts and alienation, as it is about imperialism:
−Alienation is reflected on the fact of some characters not being named, but mentioned by the function they
have, as the pilgrims, the cannibals, the General Manager, the Brickmaker −who doesn't really make bricks−,
the Russian trader, the Intended, the Aunt, and so on. But also we find alienation on Marlow considering the
Helmsman as apart of the machinery of the steamboat.
− This work doesn't openly criticizes colonialism, but rather the hypocrisy of the rhetoric used to justify the
invasion of colonies: the men who work for the Company describe what they do as trade, and their treatment
of native Africans as part of a project of civilization. In order to criticize this hypocrisy in a subtle way,
Marlow gives to his story a certain tone of irony: the blacks are being used by the civilised as carriers that
come every week by bringing supplies from lower stations to stations farther in the Congo. The fact remains
that the whites may be considered the savages for working those men to death.
In order to criticize colonialism, the theme of madness appears linked to imperialism, as a result of this one:
Africa is responsible for mental disintegration as well as for physical illness. Madness has two primary
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functions: 1st) it serves as an ironic device to engage the reader's
sympathies. Kurtz, Marlow is told from the beginning,
is mad. However, his madness is only relative. Thus,
both Marlow and the reader begin to sympathize
with Kurtz and view the Company with suspicion.
2nd)Madness is the result of being removed from one's
social context and allowed to be the sole arbiter of
one's own actions.
It is curious to observe that even though Britain was an imperialist country, Conrad didn't dare to use it as an
example of colonialism in his novella, but he used on his purpose the example of the Belgian imperialism.
Maybe that's why this work is susceptible to be autobiographical, and so,
Conrad used real facts of his own life.
SYMBOLISM IN HEART OF DARKNESS
Much of the imagery in Heart of Darkness is arranged in patterns of opposition and contrast. For instance:
* Light/Dark; White/Black:
−Light and white have the meanings of life, goodness, enlightenment, civilized, religion.
Black and Dark denote: death, evil, ignorance, mystery, savagery, uncivilized.
The Fog is a sort of corollary to darkness, because it not only obscures but distorts: it gives one just enough
information to begin making decisions, but no way to judge the accuracy of that information, which often
ends up being wrong.
This symbolism is not new; these connotations have been present in society for centuries.
In Heart of Darkness, this usual pattern is reversed, and darkness means truth, as whiteness means falsehood:
−the psychological truth within, about Marlow and all of us, is therefore dark and obscure.
−the trade on ivory, that is white but dirty.
The Whited Sepulchre, which is Brussels, where the Company's headquarters are located. A sepulchre implies
death and confinement, and indeed Europe is the origin of the colonial enterprises that bring death to white
men and to their colonial subjects.
*Civilised/Savage: A major theme of Heart of Darkness is civilisation versus savagery. The book implies that
civilisations are created by the setting of laws and codes that act as a buffer to prevent men to revert to their
darker tendencies. This implies that every man has a heart of darkness that is usually drowned out by the light
of civilisation. However, when removed from civilised society, the raw evil of untamed lifestyles within his
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soul will be unleashed.
The tendency to revert to savagery is seen in Kurtz. When Marlow meets him, he finds a man that has totally
thrown off the restraints of civilisation and has de−evolved into a primitive state.
Marlow and Kurtz are two opposite examples of the human condition: Kurtz represents what every man will
become if left to his own intrinsic desires without a protective, civilized environment. Marlow represents the
civilized soul that has not been drawn back into savagery by a dark alienated jungle.
−This idea has also any kind of relationship to the contrast of light/dark mentioned above: Marlow and Kurtz
are the light and the dark selves of a single person; Marlow is what Kurtz might have been, and Kurtz is what
Marlow might have become.
*Outer/Inner: comparisons between interiors and exteriors pervade Heart of Darkness. As the narrator states
on the beginning of the text, Marlow is more interested in surfaces than in any hidden nugget of meaning deep
within the thing itself −normally one seeks the deep message or the hidden truth−. These outer items are all
the material he is given and that he must interpret, as if they were signs, for instance: the two old women
knitting black wool, the two black hens. Or the gateposts which become heads on poles, shrunken and dried,
and that are signs of terror.
Some other symbols in the novella are:
*Women: Both Kurtz's Intended and his African Mistress function as blank slates upon which the values and
the wealth of their respective societies can be displayed.
Marlow frequently claims that women are the keepers of naïve illusions. These naïve illusions are at the root
of the social fictions that justify economic enterprise and colonial expansion −for instance, Marlow's Aunt−.
They become objects upon which men can display their own success and status.
*The River: the Congo River is the key to Africa for Europeans; it allows them access to the center of the
continent without having physically to cross it.
The current of the River seems to want to expel Europeans from Africa altogether: it makes travel upriver
slow and difficult, but the flow of water makes travel downriver, back toward civilization, rapidly and
seemingly inevitable.
CONCLUSION
Heart of Darkness concerns Marlow −a projection to whatever degree, great or small, of Conrad− and his
journey of self. Marlow reiterates often enough that he is recounting a spiritual voyage of self−discovery. He
remarks casually but crucially that he did not know himself before setting out, and that he liked work for the
chance it provides to find yourself in what no other man can know.
At a superficial level, the journey is a temptation to revert, a record of remote kinship with the wild and
passionate uproar, of a final rejection of the abomination:
The mind of a man is capable of anything, because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future.
Marlow's temptation is made concrete through his exposure to Kurtz, a white man and sometime idealist who
had fully responded to the wilderness; a potential and fallen self.
Heat of Darkness is a journey into the unconscious, and confrontation of an entity within the self. Certain
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circumstances of Marlow's voyage, looked in these terms, take on a new importance.
The true night journey can occur only in sleep or in a waking dream of a profoundly intuitive mind. Marlow
insists on the dreamlike quality of his narrative: It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream −making a vain
attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream sensation.
Even before leaving Brussels, Marlow felt as though he was about to set off for center of the earth, not the
center of a continent.
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