Example research essay topic: Heart Of Darkness Good And Evil - 1,449 words

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One of the finest stylist of modern English literature was Joseph Conrad, was a Polish-born English novelist, short story writer, essayist, dramatist, and autobiographer. Conrad was born in 1857 in a Russian-ruled Province of Poland. According to Jocelyn Baines, a literary critic, Conrad was exiled with his parents to northern Russia in 1863 following his his parents participation in the Polish independence movement. (Baines 34). His parents health rapidly deteriorated in Russia, and after their deaths in 1868, Conrad lived in the homes of relatives, where he was often ill and received sporadic schooling (35). Conrad's birth-given name was Jozef Tenor Konrad Valecz Korzeniowski, however, his name was legally changed (39). Conrad died of a heart attack, August 3, 1924, in Bishopsbourne Kent, England (34).

With such an innovative style, Joseph Conrad was perhaps one of Britains most remarkable authors of modern English literature. Throughout Conrad's career, his works have became influential as well as remarkable. Cited by Ted E. Boyle, a short story analysis, Conrad's novels are complex moral and psychological examinations of ambiguous nature of good and evil (Boyle 93). Conrad's characters are repeatedly forced to acknowledge their own failures and the weakness of their ideals against all forms of corruption; the most honorable characters are those who realize their fallibility but still struggle to up hold the dictates of conscience (99). Early in life, Conrad pursued a career as a seaman, sailing to Martinique and the West Indies.

In 1894, he began a career as a writer, basing much of his work on his experience as a seaman (100). Throughout his career, Conrad examined the impossibility of living by a traditional code of conduct. His novels postulate that the complexity of the human spirit allows neither absolute fidelity to any ideal nor even to ones conscience (Baines 49). Conrad's work failure is a fact of human existence, and every ideal contains the possibilities for its own conniption (Boyle 34). Most of Conrad's greatest works take place on a ship or in the backwaters of civilization. After assessing Conrad's works, Douglas Hewitt, a renown critic, claimed that a ship or a small outpost offered an isolated environment where Conrad could develop his already complex moral problems without unnecessary entanglements that might obscure the concentration of tragedy.

Nostromo is widely recognized as Conrad's most ambitious novel. An account of a revolution in the fictitious South American country of Costaguana, Nostromo examines the ideals, motivations, and failures of several participants in that contact (Hewitt 60). Conrad himself referred to Nostromo as his largest canvas, and many critics consider the novel as one of the greatest in twentieth century (Boyle 90). Conrad's current reputation rests with such relatively early works a Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, and Nostromo, in which imagery, symbolism, and shifts in time and perspective combine to create an intriguing, mystical series of fictional settings. The two greatest examples of moral tragedy in his work are Lord Jim (1900), which examines the failures of a man before society and his own conscience, and Heart of Darkness (1899), a dreamlike tale of mystery and adventure set in central Africa that is also the story of a mans symbolic journey into his own inner being (Hewitt 68). In his own preface to the Niger of the Narcissus (1897), an essay that has been called his artistic credo, Conrad expressed his intention of forcing the readers involvement in his work: my task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you feel it is, before all to reach his audience.

That and no more, and it is everything. (Conrad 3) Bruce Johnson, a renown essay critic, stated that Conrad's examination of the ambiguity of good and evil is generally considered too stylized and heavy-handed. Johnson claims that Conrad's most highly regarded works, however, are acknowledged as masterpieces of English literature and continue to generate significant critical commentary. Conrad produced thirteen novels, tow volumes of memoirs, and twenty-eight short stories, a though writing was not easy or painless for him (Johnson 11). In most of Conrad's writings his outlook is bleak. He writes in a rich, vivid prose style with a narrative technique that makes skillfully use of breaks in linear chronology (Boyle 80). His character development is powerful and compelling.

Conrad's life at sea and in foreign ports furnished the background for much of his writing, giving rise to the impression that he was primarily committed to foreign or alien concerns (Johnson 11). According to editor Zdzislaw Najder, Conrad's major interest was the human condition (Najder 34). Conrad studied at schools in Poland and user tutors in Europe (Baines 49). Conrad himself claims the truth is necessarily a function of ones own personal sensory experience, a writing may be lost; a lie may be written, but what the eye has seen is truth and remains in the mind (Conrad 3). His narrative style is characterized by vivid sensory descriptions of immediate experience (Baines 49). Conrad's The Lagoon is a curiously inconclusive story which prefigures many of the moral ambiguities found in his later works.

The story presents a problem typical of many Conrad narratives (Johnson 87). As in the later narratives, the question of the protagonist final choice entails the more general one of how indeterminate Conrad believes all conceptions of truth and mortality to be (89). The Lagoon, has an omniscient narration, who presumably represents Conrad's point of view, and who conveys this point of view through a wealth of complex imagery. Although this imagery has been considered excessive according to Zdzislaw Najder, it actually carries the thematic burden to a degree found in few prose narratives (Najder 33). In many ways, imagery in The Lagoon serves the functions which make complex narrators and narrations serve in later stories. Like the inverted order of many Contain plots, the imagery of The Lagoon reveal meaning recursively rather than linearly (Najder 43).

The nature imagery which dominates the story from the beginning is, at first reading, overwhelming especially with no story of human experience. Rather, it usually represents a state of delusion, a clinging to false ideals as do the false down mist in the lagoon and the irony and skills which represent Kurtzs ideals in Heart of Darkness (Johnson 53). As in several of Conrad's works, sunset and sunrise frame a main action which involves a symbolic setting of one way of seeing the world and the dawn of an other way (54). This imagery implies that the source of truth is never fully present; our apprehension of it keeps changing, never reappearing in the same form from day to day.

Each conception of truth is overwhelmed by illusions just as the literal enormous conflagration of sunset is put out by the swift and stealthy shadows (58). Brutal knowledge about Conrad's goal remains changing and ambiguous since the east harbours both light and darkness, sunrise and the rising of the night, truth and illusion (Conrad 2). In other works, especially Heart of Darkness, Conrad describes nature as a jungle whose stillness represents not emptiness but an implacable force, a primal reality of vital life which calls forth something related in human psyche. The force behind the stillness in the lagoon sums equally real and inaccessible. As in Heart of Darkness, the human darkness within is more dangerous than the natural darkness without (4). The distortions of perception caused by human emotions make it even more important to be suspicious of all apparently definite, changeless truths and goods (Johnson 53).

Moreover, his works focus on the suppression of selfishness, dedication to others, and realism about human limitations necessary to survive morally in the shadowy country (Baines 34). Futher more, The Lagoon, in particular doesnt even have sufficient dualistic mechanism enrolled to develop the paradox inherent in the heros action, and the story remains simple and without Conrad's usual psychological interest (Johnson 12). In conclusion, Joseph Conrad, succeeded as an innovative novelist as one of the finest stylist of modern English literature. Stephen Land similarity maintains that purposive action in Conrad is impossible because his works depict a dualism of antagonistic forces against which the heros compromised exertion of will contains or brings about its own negation (13). Conrad urges that his essay The Lagoon argues that the imagery no only provides a fundamental metaphysical dualism between reality and human desire, but also provides sufficient context to distinguish between meaningful and self-deluding uros action.

but his conclusion that there is no light and no peace, just death for many, is drawn when he is in a dumb darkness of human sorrow in which human see nothing despite the dazzling dawn around him (Baines 39).

Research essay sample on Heart Of Darkness Good And Evil