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Overview of metaphors we live by
The culture described in Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
The culture described in Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
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The Metaphors of Heart of Darkness
Within the text of Heart of Darkness, the reader is presented with many metaphors. Those that recur, and are most arresting and notable, are light and dark, nature and Kurtz and Marlow. The repeated use of light and dark imagery represents civilization and primitiveness, and of course the eternal meaning of good and evil. However, the more in depth the reader goes the more complex it becomes. Complex also are the meanings behind the metaphors of nature included within the text. It represents a challenge for the colonists, often also signifying decay and degeneration. Finally Kurtz and Marlow represent imperialism and the colonists. All these metaphors come together and contribute not only to the effect for the reader, but also to the overall meaning.
From the very moment Marlow speaks the reader is presented with light and dark imagery. It should be noted, however, that darkness seems to dominate. The light and dark, being binary oppositions, come to represent other binary oppositions, such as civilized and uncivilized, and of course good and evil. The primitive 'savages' are described as dark, both literally in regards to skin tone, but also in attitude and inwardly. Marlow calls the natives at the first station "black shadows of disease and starvation" (Conrad 20). A little further into the text, Marlow is horrified by what he is seeing, by the darkness he and the reader are being presented with. These are both excellent examples of the negativity towards the natives throughout the book. So, the darkness of the natives is a metaphor for their supposed incivility, evilness and primitiveness. However, if the reader looks a little deeper, they can see that this darkness also ...
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...ss: Search for the Unconscious. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987.
Conrad, Joseph Heart of Darkness. 3rd ed. New York: Norton, 1997
Csicseri, Coreen. "Themes and Structure of Heart of Darkness." Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad 6 December 1998.
Available: <http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~csicseri/themes.htm> (2 May 2001).
Dunson, David. "The symbol of the Wilderness in Heart of Darkness." 3 November 1999.
Available <http://www.rsl.ukans.edu/~dunson/hod.html> (2 may 2001).
Harkness, Bruce. Conrad's Heart of Darkness and the Critics. Belmont, Cal.: Wadsworth, 1965.
Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness, A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism , ed. Ross C. Murfin. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989.
Rosmarin, Adena. "Darkening the Reader: Criticism and Heart of Darkness." ed. Ross C. Murfin. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989.
Alice Walker, through her essay "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens", and Paule Marshall, in "Poets In The Kitchen", both write about the African-American women of the past and how these women have had an impact on their writing. Walker and Marshall write about an identity they have found with these women because of their exposure to the African culture. These women were searching for independence and freedom. Walker expresses independence as found in the creative spirit, and Marshall finds it through the spoken word. Walker and Marshall celebrate these women's lives and they see them as inspirations to become black women writers.
Cox, C. B. Conrad: Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, and Under Western Eyes. London: Macmillan Education Ltd., 1987.
Characterization is the most prevalent component used for the development of themes in Flannery O?Connor?s satirical short story ?Good Country People.? O?Connor artistically cultivates character development throughout her story as a means of creating multi-level themes that culminate in allegory. Although the themes are independent of each other, the characters are not; the development of one character is dependent upon the development of another. Each character?s feelings and behavior are influenced by the behavior of the others.
"This was not the man the man who had gone away from her; the man she
...the narrator and all people a way of finding meaning in their pains and joys. The two brothers again can live in brotherhood and harmony.
Most of Walker's fiction work is suffuse by her Southern background. Alice Walker was born on February 9, 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia which is considered to be a rural town where most black workers work as lessee farmer. She was the eighth and the last child of Minnie Tallulah Grant Walker and Willie Lee Walker. Her parents were poor sharecroppers. In the summer of 1952 at the age of eight, she fell into a depression when her older brother accidentally shot her with a BB gun, causing her to lost one sight of her eye. (LLC n.pag) She later started to hidden herself from the other kids in her neighborhood. She explained, "I no longer felt like the little girl I was. I felt old, and because I felt I was unpleasant to look at, filled with shame. I retreated into solitude, and read stories and began to write poems." (Alice Walker) However later in her high school senior year in 1961, Walker got a rehabilitation scholarship to Spelman, a college for black women in Atlanta. In here, she became involved in the civil rights movement and associated in sit-ins at local business establishments. In her junior year, she transferred to another college in Bronxville, New York called Sarah Lawrence College and graduate there in 1965. In 1967, Walker married a Jewish Civil rights attorney, Melvyn Leventhal where she was an activist and teacher in Mississippi.
According to Marx, the key to understanding the social reality is not found in abstract ideas, but in the factories or in the coal mines, where workers carry out the duties that are beyond the limitations of humanity, to prevent themselves from dying of starvation, in which the unemployed people find dignity as a human being because there is no way aside from it. The capitalist is
Through David and his perception of the many metaphors contained within Giovanni’s room, James Baldwin is showing a negative interpretation of homosexuality as identified in society. The metaphors within Giovanni’s room are Giovanni’s prison, symbolic of Giovanni’s life, holding the relationship between Giovanni and David, being a metaphor of homosexuality for David and being a tomb underwater. These metaphors are negative and exist to demonstrate to the reader that homosexuality is restricting, punishing, dirty and suffocating. These negative connotations of homosexuality are brought from society and internalized by the characters and builds into self hate.
The key themes of Baldwin’s essay are love, hatred, rage, and anger. These themes quickly transform into recurring strands that Baldwin applies throughout his essay. These ...
As Marlow assists the reader in understanding the story he tells, many inversions and contrasts are utilized in order to increase apperception of the true meaning it holds. One of the most commonly occurring divergences is the un orthodox implications that light and dark embody. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness brims with paradoxes and symbolism throughout its entirety, with the intent of assisting the reader in comprehending the truth of not only human nature, but of the world.
In a period heavily influenced by Karl Marx and the quest for realistic portrayals of life in literature, Emile Zola wrote Germinal. This book realistically depicts the lives of the miners, as well as the beliefs that they turn to. The miners, following in Etienne’s footsteps, condemn capitalism and the bourgeois. Zola condemns capitalism and shows its power of corruption among the bourgeois, the miners, and in Etienne. It is safe to say that the bourgeois and the miners did not collaborate. The bourgeois lived an easy life supported by capitalism: “Since 1789 the bourgeois had been living on the fat of the land, and so greedily that they didn’t leave … even the plates to lick” (Zola 45). The image of this carnivore eating up all of the food is capitalism in the extreme.
universal theme of suffering. Baldwin uses the main character David to exemplify an individual's struggle to accept himself, unfortunately his rite of passage is thwarted by his inability to accept his humanity in a world of socially ascribed sexual categories.
The opposite of darkness is always light giving the impression that the darkness in the story has the chance of becoming something else. The darkness in the jungles of the African Congo represent something that is uncivilized and untamed. As the reader continues throughout the story it becomes clear that these characteristics are not of the land but rather of the savage and dark natives. It becomes clear that Marlow shares many of his fellow European prejudices but through his own experiences encountering scenes of torture, cruelty, and near-slavery has made him a skeptic of imperialism. This is made clear when Marlow states, "The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look not it too much."
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.
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness 3rd ed. Ed. Robert Kimbrough. New York: Norton Critical, 1988.