Heart Of Darkness Symbolism Essay

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Man has explored many places on earth and even the moon, but places like the congo have not been explored as much. This makes it tough to try to travel and explore the unknown. This novel has symbolism throughout the entire story that leads the readers to believe something before it even happens. In this Novel “Heart of Darkness”, written by Joseph Conrad, the meaning and its development can be shown through the symbolism of the journey, the test of man’s mind, and lastly the test of man’s soul. The first meaning of development is the way that Conrad uses symbolism during the journey of Marlo (who is the main character of the story). During this novel Marlo goes on a exploration to the Congo to try and find Kurtz who is the head of the company. On the boat working their way into the Congo there is a very thick fog that rolls in. Marlo calls this fog “the blind whiteness.” (Conrad 7) This foreshadows into the story by using the fog.This lets the readers know that the story is going to be more dark, quiet, and evil. The madness farther in the story is shown a sneak peek by Conrad. This is one case of symbolism that propels the story even though this novel has many more that we could bring up. …show more content…

A Major point in this story was (The Test). This was a test of sanity ; every single person that has gone to the congo has not returned because they have went insane. Once they were gone they would join the savages and live like them also. Kurtz who was highly thought of around his parts was tested with the Congo and failed. The test started when he was making a fortune on the ivory that he was mining from the Congo. Conrad has a big theme of how power has a way of finding a way into one’s head. His overall theme is that eventually everyone will be be tested. As one can see Kurtz failed badly and was indeed insane up to the day of his

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