# of Words: 456

We really can not say it better than Joseph Conrad himself. A crazy story of a journalist who becomes director of a station at the (African) inside and makes himself worshipped by a tribe of savages. Thus described, the topic seems funny, but it is not. No--not funny in any way. Place in the African Interior and based on Conrad's own experiences as the captain of a Belgian steamer, Heart of Darkness is not much enjoy the rousing adventure story that it sounds like.

of colonialism. And in February of 1899, readers of Blackwood's Magazine--a high-falutin' literary match, kind of similar to The New Yorker--were treated to the very first of its three parts.

And get this: he wasn't even a native English speaker. Conrad was Polish, and he did not really learn English before he was in his twenties--and afterwards he had already discovered French. (Think about that next time you whine about having to write an article.) His works explore the seedy underbelly of imperialism, the movement of European nations to stake out assert to different far-flung parts of the planet.

Heart of Darkness is place right after the Scramble for Africa, the period of the late nineteenth century when imperial powers sliced up and doled out Africa like some particularly delicious--and ivory-rich--birthday cake.None of the Western nations really come off looking great in this entire debacle, however Belgium, sadly, looks particularly bad. They had been following the precious ivory hidden away from the African Interior, and they were not reluctant to brutalize and oppress the Africans to be able to get it. Heart of Darkness follows the disturbing travel of English ivory-trading representative Marlow, who, working for a Belgian firm, travels into the jungles of Africa in search of a mysterious man named Kurtz who appears to possess (1) become a god-like figure, and (two) gone totally off his rocker.

However, Heart of Darkness is much, much greater than a story about a trip up the lake.

Really.

Most contemporary critics concur that the novel is about the important emptiness at the heart of humankind--and speech. That is why T. S. Eliot employed a quotation from the novel as an epigraph to his poem "The Hollow Men," a very important and famous literary exploration of contemporary life.

One last and important thing: in 1975, Nigerian author Chinua Achebe spoke out from the novel. He accused it of making its purpose by dehumanizing Africans and decreasing them to extensions of the hostile and primal jungle environment. Conrad's speech was beautiful and enchanting, he explained--but it was wrong. Hmmm. Beautiful, enchanting, and wrong. To us, that sounds much like how Marlow would describe Kurtz--and it is a fantastic example of the way head-twistingly complicated this novel is.

Related Papers

Gone With The Wind Margaret Mitchell

You can not get Gone With the Wind into Short. It's enormously--perhaps even ridiculously--long. Seriously: The only real difference on the planet that can contain this beast of a book is probably the Coco de Mer. Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel is a terrific, sweeping tale about the catastrophe of the Civil War, the end of civilization as the South's known it, and love turned to dust. It is, in short, a book in which everything goes horribly wrong. You'd think that as long and as tragic as......Read More

The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time Mark Haddon

Mark Haddon was a writer and illustrator of children's books, who one day decided to write a new book for adults instead. An image popped into his head -- of a dead poodle in someone's front yard, stabbed with a pitchfork -- and he believed it was just about the funniest thing in the world (origin). However, before we give him the old "you're nuts" therapy, let us take a look at what that turned into. From this picture alone, Haddon established the hugely successful The Curious Incident of the......Read More

The Birthmark Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne was a 19th-century New England writer best known for writing The Scarlet Letter. Many of his works reflect his somewhat Puritan background and are highly moralistic. Hawthorne often holds certain moral values up as exemplary and, at the same time, points out that the guy is failing miserably in attaining them. In fact, he is frequently cited as a key player in the "Dark Romanticism" genre, where man's failures and flaws have been examined and criticized. See "Genre" for more......Read More

Related Topics