Heart of Darkness – Contextual Overview and Interpretation

This paper, written to fulfill a requirement for a class on British Modernism, analyses Joseph Conrad's novella, "Heart of darkness".

2015

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness bears particular relevance to the reader of the postmodern reader as it presents a story delving into the heart of the postcolonial discourse. At different times in history, the novella has received varying readings ranging from the postcolonial, autobiographical and even those that justify the colonizer's rationale. The reason for this is Conrad's craft in creating a truly discursive work, that remains a continuity to the present moment. This paper is a review of Conrad's masterpiece and attempts to situate it within the present context.

General Lecture given to students and their instructors at American U. of Beirut to introduce the book of the week in some kind of 'Great Books/History of Ideas' program.

2010

This essay will revolve around the critical reception of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The focus will be on three primary sources: firstly, the early critical reception and how the novella was received when it was originally published in 1902, secondly, Chinua's famous critique in 1977 when he called Conrad a racist and condemned both the author and the novella, and thirdly, Said's defence and contextualization of Conrad's novella in 1992. The essay will explore how the critics have been influenced and from what standpoints they have entered into the debate on Conrad and show how the discussion has changed over time. Furthermore, it will show that the early responses ignore the 'race' aspect because 'race-thinking' was seen as something natural. It will also explain why Achebe might feel so strongly against Conrad. He is after all fighting for a strong African identity after the colonies gained their independence. Said defends and contextualizes Conrad as a creature of his time. Finally, the essay will discuss and contrast the critics, concluding that each critique is highly influenced by the time-period in which it was written.

2008

IJELJUN, 2021

Joseph Conrad, a Polish writer born in 1857, before consolidating himself in the literary world was a sailor in both the French and British navies, wherein 1886 became naturalized English. Subsequently, he abandoned his career at sea to dedicate himself to literature and in 1899 published the novel Heart of Darkness, first divided into three parts at Blackwood's Magazine and in the year 1902 launched as a single book. In the work, Conrad uses a little of the experience he acquired as a sailor, taking inspiration from his own trip to Congo to build the narrative. Despite their Polish nationality and having learned English only at the age of twenty, Conrad achieved a notorious position in the pantheon of the great writers of the language English and therefore The Heart of Darkness has become a classic of literature.

Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 2015

The present paper aims at providing an archetypal analysis of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness which in turn gets its most effective impetus from Carl Yung's theory of "collective unconscious". Yung believed that our collective unconscious is a primordial treasure of dreams and myths which we have inherited from the time of our forefathers and which contains the universal themes and images. For him, mythology was a textbook of archetypes, and literature contained the whole dream of mankind. In Heat of Darkness, Joseph Conrad has created a modern myth which decodes the language of the unconscious via some archetypal images. These images depict the contemporary issues of the time both on historical and psychological levels. In a series of archetypal images, which Conrad has delicately selected, organized, and interwoven, the novel represents the deepest inclinations of the universal man as well as his unconscious desires like the desire for quest, for growth, for truth, and for self-recognition. To see how these images mirror the human nature, the present paper attempts to analyze the construction and interrelations of these archetypes.

Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness contains a multitude of references to light and darkness, as well as sight and blindness, that exist to reveal the nonexistence of a conventional mode of storytelling. Rather than being strictly good, lightness becomes a type of narrative clarity, both visual and metaphorical; likewise, darkness serves as a shrouding of the narrative intentions and themes of the novel, morphing into images of actual blindness and concealment. While Victorian era adventure novels left us with a sure footing in terms of plot, characters, and themes, Heart of Darkness provides no solid ground in this way. It uses images and suggestions of dark and blindness to highlight that beneath the thin narrative lies nothing of substance. The dichotomous relationship between the hidden and revealed is precisely what Conrad uses to establish Heart of Darkness as a Modernist experiment in storytelling that is ultimately unfulfilling in every traditional sense: we are left unsure of everything, from the identity of our frame narrator, the believability of Marlow, and the veracity of the novel's themes of human darkness. The purpose of the narrative remains, but for a few brief moments, shrouded in darkness. My intent is to call attention to where the novel breaks to reveal the lack of traditional narrative scaffolding beneath its readers-the subtle hints Conrad gives his readers that they are searching for answers to the unanswerable-the purpose of which is to subvert expectation and shift the aesthetics of his storytelling toward Modernism.