Heart Of Darkness 11

Want to read the rest of this paper? Join Essayworld today to view this entire essay and over 50,000 other term papers

in Conrad. The vast, abstract darkness that he envisions is too complex and overwhelming to be reduced to a clear or explicit truth. Instead, the truths of the world that Conrad creates in Heart of Darkness are, like those of the real world, necessarily messy, suggestive, irrational, and general.
In a sense, it is trying to explain the unexplainable brings Marlow to the Congo in the first place. Like a knight searching for adventure, Marlow was drawn to the Congo, "the biggest, the most blank, so to speak" (p 71) place on the map. Once there, Marlow discovers firsthand the horrors of colonialism as well as an even greater pull in the figure of Kurtz, a mysterious and startlingly efficient agent living deep within the African jungle. Kurtz is first introduced quite casually to Marlow by the Accountant, who describes him as "remarkable" and "first-class" (p 84). At the Central Station, Marlow's vision of Kurtz is fleshed out to include such descriptors as "prodigy", and "an ...

Get instant access to over 50,000 essays. Write better papers. Get better grades. Already a member? Login

Marlow belief in Kurtz's revelatory powers become, that when he thought that he would not have a chance to hear Kurtz speak after all, he felt as if he "had been robbed of a belief or had missed my destiny in life..." (p 120).
Unfortunately for Marlow, Kurtz is not the great prophet that Marlow makes him out to be, at least, not in the sense that Marlow expects. At the Inner Station, Marlow discovers the answer to his earlier question of "just what such a man [Kurtz] would do when he got to the top," when he realizes that Kurtz had set himself up as a god to the natives. Here as in most of the rest of the book, Kurtz is portrayed, not as an individual person, but as an agent of some ...

Succeed in your coursework without stepping into a library. Get access to a growing library of notes, book reports, and research papers in 2 minutes or less.

CITE THIS PAGE: