StudentShare
Contact Us
Sign In / Sign Up for FREE
Search
Go to advanced search...

The Heart of Darkness - Essay Example

Cite this document
Summary
Name Professor Subject Date New Imperialism in The Heart of Darkness Heart of Darkness, is a story of Charlie Marlow, a young man who wants to make a journey, and sets off for the Congo River. He hears about a man named Kurtz who was at that time in the jungle-wilderness of interior Congo…
Download full paper File format: .doc, available for editing
GRAB THE BEST PAPER98.5% of users find it useful
The Heart of Darkness
Read Text Preview

Extract of sample "The Heart of Darkness"

Download file to see previous pages

As he travelled from the Outer Station to the Central Station and then up the river to the Inner Station, he saw torture, cruelty, and near-slavery. The men who work for the Company, saying that what they were doing as “trade,” and their behavior towards native Africans as part of the civilizing process, were making those "ignorant African people" stop their horrid, barbaric ways. Kurtz is the symbol of European imperialism in the story. His vicious honesty led him to his end, as the evil practices of Europeans in Africa were in danger of exposure through his accomplishment.

He is did not hide the fact that he took ivory by force and treated the natives with violence and intimidation. He represented imperialism in its entirety in Africa. Kurtz’s greed for ivory represented Europe’s desire for the whole world. This greed made him the animal that Marlow found. Kurtz is imperialism and his life in the Congo represented imperialism and the eventual destruction European imperialism itself. On page 14 of Part 3, Conrad described Kurt as the imperialist he had been.

“I thought his memory was like the other memories of the dead that accumulate in every man’s life—a vague impress on the brain of shadows that had fallen on it in their swift and final passage; but before the high and ponderous door, between the tall houses of a street as still and decorous as a well-kept alley in a cemetery, I had a vision of him on the stretcher, opening his mouth voraciously, as if to devour all the earth with all its mankind. He lived then before me; he lived as much as he had ever lived—a shadow insatiable of splendid appearances, of frightful realities; a shadow darker than the shadow of the night, and draped nobly in the folds of a gorgeous eloquence”.

The vision of Kurt in the stretcher opening his mouth voraciously as if to devour all the earth and all its mankind signified the torture, cruelty, intimidation, violence and insatiable greed that come with the process of “civilizing” the natives by imperialists, the ultimate goal of having the world in their hands. In this sense, Kurtz's personality was a symbol of the imperial goal of Europe. There is a striking similarity between the history book King Leopold's Ghost, by Adam Hochschild and Conrad’s the Heart of Darkness.

It seems that Leon Rom of the Force Republique was the equivalent of Kurtz character. The collection of African heads surrounding Kurtz's house, and Rom’s collections, represent the villainy of both characters. Adam Hochschild, in his book said the following: The 'Inner Station' of Heart of Darkness, the place Marlow looks at through his binoculars only to find Kurtz's collection of the shrunken heads of African 'rebels,' is loosely based on Stanley Falls. In 1895, five years after Conrad visited this post, Leon Rom was station chief there.

A British explorer-journalist who passed through Stanley Falls that year described the aftermath of a punitive military expedition against some African rebels: 'Many women and children were taken, and twenty-one heads were brought to the falls, and have been used by Captain Rom as a decoration round a flower-bed in front of his house! If Conrad missed this account, which appeared in the widely read Century Magazine, he almost certainly noticed when The Saturday Review, a magazine he admired and read faithfully,

...Download file to see next pages Read More
Cite this document
  • APA
  • MLA
  • CHICAGO
(“The Heart of Darkness Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words”, n.d.)
Retrieved from https://studentshare.org/history/1462221-the-heart-of-darkness
(The Heart of Darkness Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 Words)
https://studentshare.org/history/1462221-the-heart-of-darkness.
“The Heart of Darkness Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 Words”, n.d. https://studentshare.org/history/1462221-the-heart-of-darkness.
  • Cited: 0 times

CHECK THESE SAMPLES OF The Heart of Darkness

The Heart of Darkness Reflects the Paradoxes of Imperialism in the Late 19th entury

This factor also forms one of the major themes of the novel, which is manifested with the operation of ego, super-ego and identification of every individual with suppressed and forbidden primitive instinct of savagery (Conrad, “The Heart of Darkness”).... heart of darkness Reflecting the Paradoxes of Imperialism in the Late Nineteenth Century Table of Contents Table of Contents 2 Introduction 3 Thesis Statement 4 Paradoxes of Imperialism Reflected 4 Conclusion 6 Works Cited 7 Introduction “heart of darkness” is considered to be a novella that epitomizes the hollow aspect of civilization in the post-modern society....
3 Pages (750 words) Essay

Discuss how The Heart of Darkness reflects the paradoxes of imperialism in the late 19th century

Name Instructor Class 18 February 2012 The Horrors of the Darkness of Imperialism in Conrad's heart of darkness heart of darkness is one of arguably the finest literary criticisms of imperial expansion in nineteenth-century Africa.... hellip; In heart of darkness, Joseph Conrad skilfully exposes the moral conundrum of imperialism.... This essay discusses how heart of darkness reflects the paradoxes of imperialism in the late nineteenth century....
3 Pages (750 words) Essay

Ambiguilty and meaning in the Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

But this was negated in the narrative because it was Europe that was darker and not The Heart of Darkness which was Congo.... Here, the standard of what is morally desirable is blurred because the place that was assigned to be The Heart of Darkness was not after all darker but in fact better than Europe which we used to think as civilized.... Joseph Conrad's book heart of darkness is a complex read because of the way Conrad uses ambiguity in the novel so that its theme and plot are not clear cut....
4 Pages (1000 words) Essay

Why Marlow Lie to Kurtzs Fianc

In "heart of darkness," considered as a travelogue and true life experience of Conrad, readers are exposed to tricky situations and are carried away in the steamer of Conrad's imagination (2000).... Though heart of darkness is termed as a travelogue, the element of imagination and literary creativity is also present in it.... Conrad has been successful in creating such elements in heart of darkness and it emerges a short but thrilling experience to the reader....
5 Pages (1250 words) Essay

Conrad's Vision of the colonial world in nostromo and the heart of darkness

Starting with the setting place it is essential to understand what these represent in the larger context the two pieces are taking place.... What needs to be addressed here are the facts occurring in the fictional South of South American state of Costaguana, and the real events of Congo.... hellip; Notromo envisions that "it is certainly not a case of one nation taking over another by force and enslaving their people and resources to their own economic advantage....
4 Pages (1000 words) Essay

Mans inner darkness the heart of darkness

This essay analyzes the book “heart of darkness”, that is a searing account of one man – Kurtz- and his journey from civilization into the jungle – sinking into the dark depths of his own bestiality, drunk with the power he exerts over trusting natives who are unaware of the manner.... While Marlow started out on his journey with a great admiration for Kurtz, yet at the end when he meets the unnamed woman to whom Kurtz was engaged and to whom the author refers to as “the intended”, he is unable to be completely truthful to her about the Kurtz that he had met in the jungle and the depths of darkness into which he had sunk....
5 Pages (1250 words) Essay

Two Visions in The Heart of Darkness by Edward Said

The aim of the paper “Two Visions in The Heart of Darkness by Edward Said” is to examine two essential visions of this post-colonial situation include: 1) self-inflicted wounds of the colonies, and 2) the Europeans are sweepingly responsible for the present misfortunes.... hellip; The author analyzes the article “Two Visions in The Heart of Darkness”, which provide the best illustration of why the former colonies of the European countries undergo a fundamental crisis in the cotemporary....
2 Pages (500 words) Essay

A Discussion Comparing The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and The Tempest by Shakespeare

nbsp;  “The Tempest” and “The Heart of Darkness” are the most striking adventurer novels to ever be found in the literature.... While British playwright William Shakespeare wrote “The Tempest” as a play, British novelist Joseph Conrad wrote “The Heart of Darkness” as a straightforward novel.... Joseph Conrad depicted a meeting of two worlds in “The Heart of Darkness”.... The paper contains the comparison of “The Tempest” and “heart of darkness”....
8 Pages (2000 words) Essay
sponsored ads
We use cookies to create the best experience for you. Keep on browsing if you are OK with that, or find out how to manage cookies.
Contact Us