A Comparison Of The Power Of Identity In Heart Of Darkness And The Sun Also Rises

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Both in the Heart of Darkness and The Sun Also Rises, the characters struggle with their identity as they further dive into their respective environments. From the African badlands to the sunny European glitz and glamour, the world that the protagonists live in is not a place of comfort, pleasure or even mild partiality. Marlow and Barnes get more than they expected just by the ambience of the nature that circles them.
The characters in Hemingway’s novel go out of their way to portray that they are confident, active, and got it all figured out, but we quickly realise that they are in fact the polar opposite of what they appear. Nobody is confident, they lost all belief in themselves and they aren’t true to their conscious. Jake Barnes, the protagonist and one of the novel’s more established characters, faces deep insecurities about his beliefs and how these beliefs and actions coincide with each other. This is the summation of the undercutting stress and trauma of the war, just as countries reconstruct themselves after warfare, so do the people. Barnes is struggling with the injury ...

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