"Heart of Darkness" is Conrad's journey to the Self/Autobiographical elements in the "Heart of Darkness"
(by: Purwarno, Faculty of English Literature, UISU, Medan, Indonesia. E-mail: purwarnofs@uisu.ac.id)
"Heart of Darkness" is the most famous of Joseph Conrad's personal novels: a pilgrim's progress for a pessimistic and psychological age. After having finished the main draft of the novel, Conrad had remarked, "Before the Congo, I was just a mere animal." The living nightmare of 1890 seems to have affected Conrad quite as importantly as the Andre Gide's Congo experience 36 years later. The autobiographical basis of the narrative is well known and its introspective bias obvious. This is Conrad's longest journey into self. But it would do well to remember that Heart of Darkness is also a sensitive vivid travelogue and a comment on "the vilest scramble for lost that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration." (Albert Gerard).
The novel thus has its important public side as an angry document on absurd and brutal exploitation. In the characters of Marlowe and Kurtz, we see one of the greatest of Conrad's many moments of compassionate rendering. Significantly, all that narrated has been gathered from the hinterland of Conrad's own experiences during his Congo exploration.
`Heart of Darkness' is a record of things seen and done. But also Conrad was reacting to the humanitarian pretences of some of the looters precisely as the novelist today reacts to the moralism of cold propaganda. Then it was ivory poured down from the heart of darkness, now it is uranium. Conrad shrewdly recognized an institution amply developed in Nostromo - that deception is most sinister when it becomes self-decept...
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...finds Kurtz's cabin empty, his secret sharer gone a part of himself, had vanished, "what made this emotion so overpowering was - how shall I define it..."
He follows the crawling Kurtz through the grass, comes upon him - "long, pale, indistinct like a vapour exhaled by the earth." When Marlow finds it hard to define the moral shock he received on seeing the empty cabin or when he says he does not know why he was jealous of sharing his experience we can take him literally, and in a sense be thankful for his uncertainty. `Heart of Darkness' takes us into a deeper region of the mind, quite similar to the psychic union between Legatt and his secret sharer in Conrad's short story, "The Secret Sharer." We ought to share F.R. Leavis, who emphasizes the fact that Conrad was probably staring at the devil when he transmuted his experiences into fictionalized form.
Watts, Cedric. 'Heart of Darkness.' The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad. Ed. J.H. Stape. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 45-62.
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of darkness and other tales. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Print.
...o, while the novella’s archetypal structure glorifies Marlow’s domination of Kurtz. These two analyses taken together provide a much fuller and more comprehensive interpretation of the work. Conrad presents the idea that there is some darkness within each person. The darkness is is inherited and instinctual, but because it is natural does not make it right. He celebrates – and thereby almost advises – the turn from instinct. By telling Marlow’s tale, Joseph Conrad stresses to his audience the importance of self-knowledge and the unnecessity of instinct in civilization.
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad is a novel about a man named Marlow and his journey into the depths of the African Congo. Marlow is in search of a man named Kurtz, an ivory trader. Though Marlow?s physical journey seems rather simple, it takes him further into his own heart and soul than into the Congo. The setting, symbols and characters each contain light and dark images, these images shape the central theme of the novel.
In Joseph Conrad’s short story, “Heart of Darkness,” the narrator, Marlow language, and point of view to convey the conflicting emotions he has about Kurtz due to the image he fabricated Kurtz to be, and the reality of Kurtz. Marlow’s language throughout the piece reveals to the reader how he feels about Kurtz and how he perceives Kurtz’s actions. Marlow’s point of view also allows him to support both of his perceptions of Kurtz because he doesn’t see only bad or only good in
Throughout its entirety, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness utilizes many contrasts and paradoxes in an attempt to teach readers about the complexities of both human nature and the world. Some are more easily distinguishable, such as the comparison between civilized and uncivilized people, and some are more difficult to identify, like the usage of vagueness and clarity to contrast each other. One of the most prominent inversions contradicts the typical views of light and dark. While typically light is imagined to expose the truth and darkness to conceal it, Conrad creates a paradox in which darkness displays the truth and light blinds us from it.
On the surface, Heart of Darkness is the exploration of the African Congo where the explorers are trying to conquer the natives and make a profit in the ivory business. However, there is much more to the short novel written by Joseph Conrad than just the surface. It is also the exploration of the unconscious where the goal is to conquer the unknown. At the same time when Heart of Darkness was surfacing in the 20th century society, a psychologist named Sigmund Freud was publishing his research findings. Freud’s research of the unconscious and Conrad’s journey into darkness is remarkably similar. John Tessitore, a modern critic, says of the similarity, "...it is enough simply to observe that two great minds found themselves arriving at identical conclusions and expressed those conclusions through the modes of their individual disciplines" (Tessitore 93). Specifically comparable are Conrad’s exploration of the mind and Freud’s exploration of the id, superego, and ego.
Heart of Darkness is a kind of little world unto itself. The reader of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness should take the time to consider this work from a psychological point of view. There are, after all, an awful lot of heads and skulls in the book, and Conrad goes out of his way to suggest that in some sense Marlow's journey is like a dream or a return to our primitive past--an exploration of the dark recesses of the human mind.
Heart of Darkness, is not only an intense tale of pursuit, but also a psychological roller coaster as, through the characters of the story, Joseph Conrad shows us a powerful struggle between the Freudian personalities of id, ego and superego. The main characters of the novel, Marlow and Kurtz are mainly identified with the id and the super-ego type of personalities, and throughout the novel, these characters are placed in intense situations which makes them question their own beliefs and reactions, and ultimately their human personality. Hence, in between the characters, not only is there a battle in the physical sense, but also on the meta-physical level. This leads to a psychological imbalance between the human personalities of both the characters, and while one character is already dominated by his id to a large extent, the other character grapples with the struggle of his id with his super-ego.
When writers write, it is often to convey a deeper meaning or truth to it readers. With this in mind, we should first take the book at face value then analysis the story to see the point that the writer revels. In The Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad does this very well. The story goes from what we originally thought as just a story of a journey into Africa to a story of indeed a journey to the hearts of men. Conrad’s truth in The Heart of Darkness is multi-layered in dealing with imperialism and colonialism, but leads us to a critique of humanity as a whole. The biggest issue that Conrad shows in this book, is his philosophy of the dark nature of man. This paper will explore the evidence for the nature of man theory and then look at the proposed solution subtlety given by Conrad.
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad may be a narrative about colonisation, revealing its drawbacks and corruption, but it may also be understood as a journey into the depths of one’s psyche, if taken at a symbolic level.
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness 3rd Ed. Ed. Robert Kimbrough. New York: Norton Critical, 1988.
In his novella Heart of Darkness (1899), Joseph Conrad through his principal narrator, Marlow, reflects upon the evils of the human condition as he has experienced it in Africa and Europe. Seen from the perspective of Conrad's nameless, objective persona, the evils that Marlow encountered on the expedition to the "heart of darkness," Kurtz's Inner Station on the banks of the snake-like Congo River, fall into two categories: the petty misdemeanors and trivial lies that are common- place, and the greater evils -- the grotesque acts society attributes to madmen. That the first class of malefaction is connected to the second is illustrated in the downfall of the story's secondary protagonist, the tragically deluded and hubristic Mr. Kurtz. The European idealist, believing the lies of his Company and of the economic imperialism that supports it, is unprepared for the test of character that the Congo imposes, and succumbs to the potential for the diabolical latent within every human consciousness.
* Conrad, Joseph. “Heart of Darkness” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, M.H. Abrams, general editor. (London: W.W. Norton, 1962, 2000)
Heart of Darkness is a story full of irony and deception. At one point, Conrad made a very interesting point. He suggested that the light is used to indicate deceit in Heart of Darkness. Conrad uses the character of Marlow to make use of his own thoughts and views about the people in the Congo. He feels pity for them as he sees them falling down carrying heavy packages and Kurtz commanding them like a battalion of troops.