Joseph Conrad polish colonial worked as a seaman on French and British ships before becoming a British citizen in 1886. He developed an elegant, stunning English prose style what probed many of the modern fiction in his short stories and novels. His works ware by turns adventurous and darkly gloomy, attentive in the traditional qualities of resoluteness and bravery. Also, it concerned with the epistemological voids that define modern reality and awareness. It noted one of the most experts of fictional impressionism. Conrad offered that type of fictional rendering of subjective retort that reflectively impact on writers. However, the experiences of his life as a sailor greatly influenced his writing. He wrote that the principal task of the novelist was “Heart of Darkness”.
Joseph Conrad was born Jozef Teodor Konrad in Berdichev, Poland, in 1857. He grew up in the Polish Ukraine, a large society, abundant plain between Russia and Poland. It was a separated nation with four languages, four religions, and a number of diverse social classes. A division of the Polish speaking populations, including Conrad’s family, fitted to the szlachta, a genetics class in the nobility of the social hierarchy, uniting the qualities of gentry and dignity. They had political authority and notwithstanding their underprivileged state.
Conrad parents were well educated in that time, but they had to struggle and strived for rest of life because of participating with political group. Conrad’s father, Apollo Korzeniowski studied for six years at St. Petersburg University, which he left before earning a degree. Also he was a word translator and writer. Conrad’s mother, Eva Bobrowska was thirteen years younger than Apollo and the only surviving daughter in h...
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...he complicated relation between subjectivity and epistemology. On the other hand, Joseph Conrad was remembered for a novel like “Heart of Darkness”, which drew on his experience as a mariner and addressed profound themes of nature and existence as well.
In many ways “Heart of Darkness” was a provisional novel between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Later on many of them were taken it as an adventure novel and started stage performances all over the world. The idea of a horror so terrible it could not be named was a nineteenth century mentality, as was the idea of anthropophagy as an extraordinary horror. The book was meanings as a lead in to the twentieth century for a number of reasons. One of the most important aspects was tied to twentieth-century susceptibilities as the sense of cultural belief, awareness of the irrational and of the insensible mind.
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. The Longman Anthology of British Literature. Ed. David Damrosch, New York: Pearson. Copyright 2004.
Hay, Eloise Knapp. The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad: a Critical Study. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1972. 120. Print.
Without personal access to authors, readers are left to themselves to interpret literature. This can become challenging with more difficult texts, such as Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness. Fortunately, literary audiences are not abandoned to flounder in pieces such as this; active readers may look through many different lenses to see possible meanings in a work. For example, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness may be deciphered with a post-colonial, feminist, or archetypal mindset, or analyzed with Freudian psycho-analytic theory. The latter two would effectively reveal the greater roles of Kurtz and Marlow as the id and the ego, respectively, and offer the opportunity to draw a conclusion about the work as a whole.
Joseph Conrad was a fiction novelist who became one of the most well know novelists of his day. One of the pieces he was responsible for was a book called Heart of Darkness. This book was written about a group that was in search of a man named Kurtz down the Congo River. In the writing of this book, Conrad did a very good job of keeping his readers interested because anything could have happened. Conrad used many symbols and made the characters do certain things that kept the readers guessing. Conrad used things like fog, and changing the way that characters are acting, which made the journey in the book more ominous and less obvious. Joseph Conrad’s
Joseph Conrad’s own experiences during his trip through the Congo helped him provide a foundation for the writing of Heart of Darkness. In 1890, Conrad took a job as a captain on the river steamer Kinshasa. Before Conrad took this job, he had worked for the French merchant navy as a way to escape Russian military service and also to escape the emotional troubles that had plagued him. Conrad had been in a financial crisis that was resolved with help from his uncle. After this series of events, Conrad joined the British merchant navy at the beckoning of his uncle and took the job as the captain of a steamboat in the Congo River. An important fact to remember is that Conrad was a young and inexperienced man when he was exposed to the harsh and dangerous life of a sailor. His experiences in the West Indies and especially in the Belgium Congo were eye opening and facilitated his strong outlooks that are reflected in the book Heart of Darkness. Conrad’s journey through the Belgian Congo gave him the experiences and knowledge to write about a place that most Europeans would never see in their lives.
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.
Every story has a plot, but not every story has a deeper meaning. When viewed superficially, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is a tragic tale of the white man's journey into the African jungle. When we peel away the layers, however, a different journey is revealed - we venture into the soul of man, complete with the warts as well as the wonderful. Conrad uses this theme of light and darkness to contrast the civilized European world with the savage African world in Heart of Darkness.
al experiences in his novel, Heart of Darkness. Joseph Conrad had always been enthralled with the open oceans, maps, and uncharted territories of the African continent. He was hired by a British Company to operate a small steamship on the African Congo. He went on this trip and while there began keeping journals that would later become the basis for this novel.
Joseph Conrad's novel, "Heart of Darkness", depicts events in his personal life and how he came to believe that the European invasion of the African Congo needed to end. Joseph Conrad had a boyhood fascination of maps and the blank spaces on the African continent. Therefore, when the opportunity was given to him to become the captain of a small steamship on the Congo River, he jumped at the chance. In addition to Conrad's sense of adventure, he also had a curiosity of King Leopold's actions in the Belgium Congo and had a strong desire to witness firsthand the action taking place. After learning his assigned ship was undergoing repairs, he accompanied another crew on passenger ship assigned to bring back an ailing company agent, George Klein, who later died on the return trip. These events provided the backdrop so to speak of Conrad's novel, Heart of Darkness. The character of "Kurtz" was modeled after the company agent, George Klein. Although, Conrad never names the Congo or other significant landmarks, he later admits the book a "snapshot' of his trip in the African Congo. (Longman p2189).
Heart of Darkness was a huge milestone in the history of literature do to the impeccable way Conrad used ambiguity to describe his story. He does this by using symbols, themes, and archetypal images. These include light and dark, the Congo river, colors, and by not explaining everything to the reader. While reading the novel, the reader is actually required to interpret the text and really think about what certain details mean. The way Conrad wrote the novel is for the reader is to look for clues and develop ideas. It is completely subjective and trying to find exact answers is not an option. This writing style opened the eyes of many writers and changed the way literature was understood.
Karl, Frederick Robert. Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1979.
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)
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a great example of a Modernist novel because of its general obscurity. The language is thick and opaque. The novel is littered with words such as: inconceivable, inscrutable, gloom. Rather than defining characters in black and white terms, like good and bad, they entire novel is in different shades of gray. The unfolding of events takes the reader between many a foggy bank; the action in the book and not just the language echoes tones of gray.