Close Reading Of Heart Of Darkness

According to psychoanalytic psychology, humans connote light images with white, bright, clean, whereas darker counterparts link to murk and danger. Joseph Conrad thoroughly explores this phenomenon in Heart of Darkness, by way of Marlow’s journey through the nature of Africa as well as the nature of humans. Conrad’s dark and light are not hues or feelings- rather, they symbolize the divine wilderness of Africa and the cruel fluorescence of human rapacity and imperialism.

The African wild jungle is a vined, shady representation of the equally tangled and unexplored darkness of the human soul and psyche. Nearly a century after Conrad, psychologist Carl Jung toured Africa and expressed equally racist and eloquent ideas about it: “the journey from the heart of Africa became for me a kind of drama of the rebirth of light” (274). Likewise, Marlow experiences the dark continent and finds the darkness of the jungle to have a maddening effect on white Europeans, notably Fresleven and Kurtz. In this way, Heart of Darkness features the author’s own experiences: “he [Conrad] suffered psychological, spiritual, even metaphysical shock in the Congo, and his physical health was also damaged…” (Joseph Conrad). Still, the dark jungle burns bright with vitality “all that mysterious life of the wilderness that

However, Kurtz’s character manifests as a fiend, superego and ego taken over by the id. This is shown in Kurtz’s unsteady postscript, ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’. Marlow describes the sentiment as “luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky”, establishing light with a very negative idea (Conrad 92). At that point, Kurtz is no longer a multitalented hero of the Congo, rather its power and profit hungry overlord. He is a formerly bright soul, rendered effete by the negative effects of