Monday, May 11, 2020

Reality and Illusion in Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness...

Reality and Illusion in Heart of Darkness Fact is very important to Marlow. Facts are comprehensible. Evil isn’t a supernatural force or a force in opposition to god or life, but that which is incomprehensible to Marlow. The life of the Africans and the power of the jungle—or the larger reality of humanity—is evil in its incomprehensibility. The supreme morality is restraint, and comprehension of the jungle or acceptance of its incomprehensibility becomes symbolic for the absence of restraint in man. Purpose is good in its comprehensibility. When Marlow speaks derisively of the French man-of-war shelling an invisible ‘enemy’ to no purpose it is because he finds its actions ‘incomprehensible.’ Before Marlow becomes engaged in†¦show more content†¦Marlow found nature to be simple, with a singular comprehensible meaning; yet when he experiences the Congo, nature becomes the enemy. Nature betrays Marlow and becomes defined by silence and stillness, its meaning incomprehensi ble and multifarious. ‘My purpose was to stroll into the shade for a moment; but no sooner within than it seemed to me I had stepped into the gloomy circle of some Inferno. The rapids were near, and an uninterrupted, uniform, headlong, rushing noise filled the mournful stillness of the grove, where not a breath stirred, not a leaf moved, with a mysterious sound—as though the tearing pace of the launched earth had suddenly become audible.’ (Conrad, 44). This is the grove of death where Marlow first realizes the extent of the horror perpetrated by the white man and feels more sympathy for (but not kinship to) the dying Africans than the living colonizers. He makes a simile between the grove and Hell. To Marlow, Hell is a place where the movement of water becomes mysterious, uniform noise rather than the recognizable and comprehensible ‘voice of a brother’ that destroys uniformity; where silence is audible. This scene destabilizes the fact of water in his life and it no longer can provide comfort. In the Congo, all that Marlow trusts of realityShow MoreRelatedEssay on Hearts of Darkness: Post Colonialism850 Words   |  4 PagesWrite a critique of Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness, based on your reading about post-colonialism and discussing Conrads view of African culture as other. What would someone from Africa think about this work? Heart of Darkness starts out in London and also ends there as well. Most of the story takes place in the Congo which is now known as the Republic of the Congo. Heart of Darkness was essentially a transitional novel between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 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