|
Heart of Darkness is a novella by Joseph Conrad. This highly symbolic
story is actually a story within a story, or frame tale, narrated by a man named Marlow to colleagues at an evening gathering. It details an incident earlier
in Marlow's life, a visit up the Congo River to investigate the work of
Kurtz, a Belgian trader in ivory in the Congo Free State.
The story within a story device actually descends four levels: Conrad writes the story we read, which is the account
of an unnamed man relating Marlow's yarn of his journey down the Congo river to meet and examine the central character Kurtz. (In Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte also removed the
reader four times from Heathcliff and Catherine.)
The theme of "darkness" from the title is reflected constantly within the
book, in many different senses of the term. It is used to reflect the unknown (as Africa at the time was often called the "Dark Continent" by Europeans), the concept of the "darkness of barbarism" contrasted
with the "light of civilization" (see white man's burden), and the "spiritual
darkness" of several characters. This sense of darkness also lends itself to a
related theme of obscurity - again, in
various senses, reflecting the ambiguities in the work. Moral issues are not
clear-cut; that which ought to be (in various senses) on the side of "light" is in fact mired in darkness, and so forth.
To emphasize the theme of darkness within ourselves, Marlow's narration takes place on a yacht in the Thames tidal estuary. Early in the novella, the narrator recounts how London, the here-and-now where Conrad wrote and where a large part of his audience lived, was itself in Roman times a dark part of the world much like the Congo then was. Like Marlow himself, the
astute reader emerges from the tale with an expanded comprehension of the darkness within his own mind.
Themes developed in the novella's more superficial levels
include the naïveté of Europeans - particularly women - regarding the various forms of
darkness in the Congo; the Belgian colonialists' abuse of the natives; and man's potential for two-facedness. The symbolic levels of
the book expand on all of these in terms of a struggle between good and evil, not so much between people as within every major character's soul.
The novel has been filmed a few times under the
name Heart of Darkness; Francis Ford Coppola also
based Apocalypse Now loosely on the novel.
External links
|