Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness

The dark thoughts, which are usually ignored and not allowed to be brought up in conversation, are pushed back into the remote corners of the mind, but have the ability to run free when man is in his most vulnerable state. Sleep, the unconscious. It is in dreams where twisted stories of malevolence and horror take place. The soul’s core is full of sin from the first minute man is born. Even Adam, the original man, who was born when the earth began its timeline, has sin running through his blood. He was God’s first human creation, but destined to fall into the hands of the devil. Illustrated through chiaroscuro, every man has a heart of darkness that is drowned out by the light of civilization. However, when removed from civilization, the raw evil of untamed lifestyles within his soul will be released. Once the innate evil is released, it has the opportunity to grow stronger, and perhaps, more powerful than reason.

By means of delayed decoding, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness advances and withdrawals as in a succession of long dark waves borne by an incoming tide. It is a night journey into the unconscious and confrontation of an entity within the self. The true night journey can occur only in sleep or in a waking dream of a profoundly intuitive mind. The Heart of Darkness recaptures the past of one man who chose to travel inside himself. The narrative of this extremely ambiguous novella is “trying to tell [the reader] a dream- making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation” (pg. 95). Each man’s case is his own, his presence is made up of his past, which

cannot be shared.

Marlow experiences the terror of journeying into the territory of his heart because what ...

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...e presumption of their resting grounds are now “intruders whose knowledge of life was to [Marlow] an irritating

pretense, because [he] felt so sure they could not possibly know the things [he] knew” ( pg. 149) after returning from the heart of darkness. These people want

to look like they live a good life, even though evil pervades every aspect of their being, regardless of the color of skin, for they “are like unto whited sepulchres,

which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness” (Matthew 23:27). Like the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Marlow feels a Buddhist influence from the past, telling him that he must share his elevated wisdom with those, who have been sleep walking through their day to day existence, whose lives have not allowed them the opportunity to travel to such remote corners of the mind.