An Essay on Heart of Darkness

[هدى الليل]

An Essay on
Heart of Darkness
By
Joseph Conrad

"A Journey to the Self"

The human self is a complicated and a confused thing. Psychologists say that each human being has a hidden side that no one even the one himself knows about.

Based on personal experience, Joseph Conrad wrote his master piece Heart of Darkness in 1902, a symbolic story of dark journey through Africa, through mind ,and through heart. The journey in Heart of Darkness traverses not only the capricious water spanning our physical world but also the paradoxical ocean which exists in the heart of man and all the man kind. It's a voyage into the deepest recesses of human heart and mind.

Marlow penetrates deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness, further and further into the African wilderness, human subconscious and psyche. "Yet to understand the effect of it on me you ought to know how I got out there, what I saw, how I went up that river to the place where I first met the poor chap. It was the farthest point of navigation and the culminating point of my experience. It seemed somehow to throw a kind of light on every thing about me – and into my thoughts. It was sombre enough, too -and pitiful- not extraordinary in any way- not very clear either. No not very clear. And yet it seemed to throw a kind of light"

His psychological changes as he approaches the heart of darkness are evident in his views of the African wilderness, lying and Kurtz.


The atmosphere of gloom, desolateness and foreboding hanging over this adventure, thickens perceptibly from the moment Marlow sets foot on the Congo wilderness. In such a primitive place, Marlow has moments when his past came back to him, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare to your self; but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants, water and silence. This stillness of wilderness life didn't in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. In such a place, away from being protected from ourselves by society with its laws and its watchful neighbours, the man loses him self.

Under these circumstances Marlow's character has confronted different changes. Marlow, from the very beginning, develops a need to find Kurtz as a "very remarkable man". Marlow, like Kurtz through the trip into the wilderness, tries to discover his true nature. Kurtz death-bed pronouncement "The horror! The horror!" is the climax of the novel. Kurtz reached the ultimate knowledge about himself by being honest. He didn't die thinking himself on the right track. He had sum up, he had judged. It was an affirmation, a moral victory. Unlike Kurtz, Marlow reached the truth about himself earlier. Thus, Marlow is an early version of Kurtz and Kurtz is what Marlow could become.

Upon first entering the mouth of the Congo River, Marlow declares his stance on lying and those who lie. He believes that lying is the worst thing for a person. He vows never to lie in his life. Marlow continues his journey up of darkness. In the process, Marlow reverts back to his innate state to survive, whether or not that means going against his own principles. After Kurtz's death, Marlow finds himself transformed into a person he thought he would never become, a liar. Marlow lies to Kurtz's intended about his last words when he returns to Europe "The last word he pronounced was — your name." This shows Marlow's accepting situational ethics concept. He feels that any action can be accepted as right or wrong giving to an appropriate situation. As he himself says, "I couldn't tell her. It would have been too dark……… too dark altogether….".So in this situation, lying was necessary.

When Marlow returns to Europe, his feelings and behaviors towards people are different. He finds himself "back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretence, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flaunting of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend. I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces so full of stupid importance." He admits he wasn't very well at all at that time but "It was not my strength that wanted nursing, it was my imagination that wanted soothing."

Finally, it is obvious that Marlow is a changed character. He has lost the superficial empty happiness of life before Africa and has gained a fuller but more troubling wisdom with his return to Europe. He is a "sadder but wiser" man who seems to reflect Joseph Conrad 's own words about his trip to Africa that, "before the Congo, I was a mere animal."

[M.o_o.N]

هدى الليل

thanks alot dear sister , very good job

[سعودي انجلش]

thanks fro this great work
well done
and keep on

[جاكوار2]

[springheart]

iam studing this novel in this semester

really, I will go back for read it
by slowing

[Lolita 1]

oh, thanks sooooooo much
may Allah protect u

[✿ رِوَآءْ]

هدى الليل

Many Thanks dear for posting this wondeful essay
Heart of Darkness is one my favorite novels.

keep on dear

may Allah bless u