Example research essay topic: Heart Of Darkness Critical - 1,152 words

NOTE: Free essay sample provided on this page should be used for references or sample purposes only. The sample essay is available to anyone, so any direct quoting without mentioning the source will be considered plagiarism by schools, colleges and universities that use plagiarism detection software. To get a completely brand-new, plagiarism-free essay, please use our essay writing service.
One click instant price quote

Heart of Darkness: Critical Essay Heart of Darkness (1900) is one of Conrad's most ambiguous and difficult stories, a tale which has captivated critics with its profuse imagery and philosophical and psychological suggestiveness. I think that Conrad almost purposely constructed his work in order to provide employment to teachers, critics, and students. In Heart of Darkness, Conrad takes his deepest look into the human condition, and comes to perhaps his most pessimistic conclusions on the various and incompatible pressures that can be imposed on the human spirit. The readings that the story has given rise to are a testimonial not only to the power and range of its concerns, but to their elusiveness.

I shall try, in this paper, to locate the idea that Conrad tells us lies behind the story. Heart of Darkness, with its mythic plot, and its dualistic tension between light and dark, is particularly strong example of the strange work in our literature. I think about the question of whether Heart of Darkness is a tragedy. In the novel it is possible to find myth and archetypes have gone unheard. Noticing these echoes will serve not only to suggest solutions to specific problems of interpretation, but also to provide a basis for a discussion of Heart of Darkness as tragedy. The entrapment of light by darkness is continually suggested by the imagery of Heart of Darkness.

In the framing scene the few sparks of light are stricken by the night, and the motif is varied in the main plot with the ivory -- the light which is the object of the quest -- buried in the Dark Continent. In Heart of Darkness the demonic quality of darkness is established with images of mutilation, death, and hell -- weapons of war, dead machinery, the grove of death (hell as parody of the garden), corpses, the river of forgetfulness, phantoms, and devils. Heart of Darkness may always be a critical battleground between readers who regard it as an aesthetic triumph, and those like me who doubt its ability to rescue us from its own hopeless obscurantism. That Marlow seems, at moments, not to know what he is talking about, is almost certainly one of the narratives deliberate strengths, but if Conrad also seems finally not to know, then he necessarily loses some of his authority as a storyteller. Perhaps he loses it -- our anxiety that he will not sustain the illusion of his fictions duration long enough for us to sublimate the frustrations it brings us.

Heart of Darkness thus has its important public side, as an angry document on absurd and brutal exploitation. Marlow is treated to the spectacle of a French man-of-war shelling an unseen enemy village in the bush, and presently he will wander into the grove at the first company station where the starving and sick Negroes withdraw to die. It is one of the greatest of Conrad's many moments of compassionate rendering. The compassion extends even to the cannibal crew of the Roi des Belges. Deprived of the rotten hippo meat they had brought along for food, and paid three nine-inch pieces of brass wire a week, they appear to subsist on lumps of some stuff like half-cooked dough, of a dirty lavender color which they keep wrapped in leaves.

Conrad here operates through ambiguous suggestion (are the lumps human flesh? ) but elsewhere he wants, like Gide after him, to make his complacent reader see: see, for instance, the drunken unkempt official met on the road and three miles farther on the body of the Negro with a bullet hole in his forehead. We have to be very chary about pontificating on the totality of meaning of Heart of Darkness, wrote Harold Collins, who supposes when reading the book one should not come to simple conclusions. (104) Many researchers such as Ian Watt wonder that Joseph Conrad was a racist, writing, ... using the word cannibal to describe natives of Africa, displayed racial prose... (Watt 83) Heart of Darkness is a record of things seen and done. But also Conrad was reacting to the humanitarian pretences of some of the looters precisely as modern novelists today reacts to the morale. Then it was ivory that poured from the heart of darkness; now it can be drugs etc.

Conrad shrewdly recognized -- an intuition amply developed in Nostromo that deception is most evil when it becomes self-deception, and the propagandist takes seriously his own fictions. Conrad, again like many novelists today, was both drawn to idealism and repelled by its hypocritical abuse. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea.

Marlow commits himself to the yet unseen agent partly because Kurtz had come out equipped with moral ideas of some sort. Anything would seem preferable to the demoralized greed and total cynicism of the others. In the Heart of Darkness, the choice of words and the typical situations of invaders or ivory traders exploitation and the incidental atrocities on the natives set the tone for racism. Readers of the book are appalled by the typification of the natives and start to believe that Joseph Conrad must be a racist to extol the white pilgrims and their superior cities with their well educated names that live in pristine buildings and the levels of science that is shared by medical people by legacy. The natives are portrayed as not trainable or at the most trainable only at a minimal level, to do menial tasks only. The trackers are shown to be in control of multiple natives at a minimal effort.

In his novel Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad reverses the age-old images of black and white to add descriptive as well as deeper spiritual meaning to his novel, which in my opinion is an old and primitive trick. Through these images one can be taken on a journey of the soul where the reader must all look inward and question his / her own morals from this point Heart of Darkness can be interesting. However, sometimes we may not like what we find. Bibliography: Bloom, Harold. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Chelsea House, 1987: pp. 42 - 50 Collins, Harold R.

Twentieth - Century Literary Criticism Vol. 13, 1954. pp. 104 Harkness, Bruce, ed. Conrad's Heart of Darkness and the Critics. Belmont, Calif. : Wadsworth, 1960. Meisel, Perry.

De centering Heart of Darkness. Modern Language Studies 8, no. 3, 1978. pp. 30 - 38 Watt, Ian. Heart of Darkness and Nineteenth Century Thought. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Ed.

Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea, 1987. pp. 77 - 89

Research essay sample on Heart Of Darkness Critical