Heart of Darkness: A Journey of Exploration

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

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.

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is one of the finest works in English literature where setting plays a vital role upholding the theme. In this novella none of the themes is explicit in the surface of the story, rather the different themes are encapsulated with the different aspects of the story and one of them is ‘setting’. This study goes on finding the uniqueness in the integration of ‘setting’ and ‘theme’ in this world famous text on colonization and primitiveness.

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.

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.

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.

Narratology is the systematic study of narratives and narrative structures. Vladimir Propp initiated this by his Morphology of the Folktale in 1928. Gerard Genette introduces different analytical categories like narrative mood, narrative instance, narrative level, and narrative time. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness explores the horrible effects of imperialism and racism in Africa. It is written as a frame narrative. This paper analyses the various narrative techniques used by Conrad in developing the story into a narrative.

Joseph Conrad has been an eminent author of the modern times and his colonial writings do present a critique of the hypocritical nature of European imperialism. Many of his works are highly impressionistic in nature because of their graphic, physical representations of not only the physical landscapes of the colonized world but also the cultural ethos of the different people of those lands. But at the same time, it must not be forgotten that Conrad does probe into the inmost recesses of the characters of his works and make a thorough investigation into the abounding complexities of the human mind. In other words, Conrad‘s works are also psychological treatises where one can trace his insightful probe into the various complex processes that underlie the intricate workings of the human mind.

ABC COLOR, 2010

A revised version of an article published originally in Suplemento Cultural del Diario “ABC Color”, Asunción, Paraguay, 2000, which proposed a new reading of two of the most important novels by Joseph Conrad, “Heart of Darkness” and “Nostromo”.

Humanities science current issues, 2021

In the substantial body of criticism written about almost every aspect of the novels of Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) there is a lack of comment about the influence of personal motive on the development of the plot concept in the prose of the famous Polish-British writer. Until the first half of the twentieth century, J. Conrad was considered a writer of stories about the sea and was recognized thanks to the use of symbolism and picturesque speech. The main aim of the present research is to show that literary works and Conrad's life are intertwined. The goal is also to present that only the combination of themes and symbols from a literary work 'The Heart of Darkness' is complete and fully reflects the value of Conrad's work. The objective of the study is built on literary aspects of the novella that are the part of the present research. The intention is to reveal that symbols, motifs and themes in the text 'The Heart of Darkness' are interrelated as well. It should be mentioned that his fundamental theme is the solitude of the individual and the sea is often chosen as a symbol. It will be mentioned in the thesis that his characters are often placed in isolated or confined situations. Conrad's solitary hero is almost always a fugitive, marked by misfortune or remorse. The necessary element to understand stories written by J. Conrad is to understand their structure therefore this part revolves around various characters and events, but without omitting the main subject, that is, characteristics of his stories including unique style, symbolism, picturesque. Another important feature of the prose created by this author is his narrative. It should be noted that the events in his short stories are narrated indirectly. Also, he used an alternative type of narration. This means that an identical event is described from different points. The innovation of the research is that elements related to themes and symbols are presented as a whole, not separately, as it has been presented by literary critics so far. The indication that Conrad's personal motifs influence the narrative composition of the novella also seems to be quite innovative.