Chapters+25+Irony+and+The+Heart+of+Darkness

25 The heart of Darkness
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HEART OF DARKNESS centers around Marlow, an introspective sailor, and his journey up the Congo River to meet Kurtz, reputed to be an idealistic man of great abilities. Marlow takes a job as a riverboat captain with the Company, a Belgian concern organized to trade in the Congo. As he travels to Africa and then up the Congo, Marlow encounters widespread inefficiency and brutality in the Company's stations. The native inhabitants of the region have been forced into the Company's service, and they suffer terribly from overwork and ill treatment at the hands of the Company's agents. The cruelty and squalor of imperial enterprise contrasts sharply with the impassive and majestic jungle that surrounds the white man's settlements, making them appear to be tiny islands amidst a vast darkness. SETTING (TIME) • Latter part of the nineteenth century, probably sometime between 1876 and 1892 PROTAGONIST • Marlow

MAJOR CONFLICT • Both Marlow and Kurtz confront a conflict between their images of themselves as “civilized” Europeans and the temptation to abandon morality completely once they leave the context of European society.

RISING ACTION • The brutality Marlow witnesses in the Company's employees, the rumors he hears that Kurtz is a remarkable and humane man, and the numerous examples of Europeans breaking down mentally or physically in the environment of Africa.

CLIMAX • Marlow's discovery, upon reaching the Inner Station, that Kurtz has completely abandoned European morals and norms of behavior

FALLING ACTION • Marlow's acceptance of responsibility for Kurtz's legacy, Marlow's encounters with Company officials and Kurtz's family and friends, Marlow's visit to Kurtz's Intended

THEMES • The hypocrisy of imperialism, madness as a result of imperialism, the absurdity of evil

MOTIFS • Darkness (very seldom opposed by light), interiors vs. surfaces (kernel/shell, coast/inland, station/forest, etc.), ironic understatement, hyperbolic language, inability to find words to describe situation adequately, images of ridiculous waste, upriver vs. downriver/toward and away from Kurtz/away from and back toward civilization (quest or journey structure)

SYMBOLS • Rivers, fog, women (Kurtz's Intended, his African mistress), French warship shelling forested coast, grove of death, severed heads on fence posts, Kurtz's “Report,” dead helmsman, maps, “whited sepulchre” of Brussels, knitting women in Company offices, man trying to fill bucket with hole in it

Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, in the Ukraine, in a region that had once been a part of Poland, but was then under Russian rule. His father Apollo Korzeniowski was an aristocrat without lands, a poet and translator of Shakespeare and Dickens and French literature. The family estates had been sequestrated in 1839 following an anti-Russian rebellion. As a boy the young Joseph read Polish and French versions of English novels with his father. English was Conrad's third language; he learned to read and write in French before he knew English. Apollo Korzeniowski became embroiled in political activities. After being imprisoned for six months, he was sent to exile with his family to Volgoda, northern Russia, in 1861. Two years later the family was allowed to move to Kiev. Conrad sailed to many parts of the world, including Australia, various ports of the Indian Ocean, Borneo, the Malay states, South America, and the South Pacific Island. In 1890 he sailed in Africa up the Congo River. The journey provided much material for his novel Heart of Darkness. However, the fabled East Indies particularly attracted Conrad and it became the setting of many of his stories. By 1894 Conrad's sea life was over. During the long journeys he had started to write and Conrad decided to devote himself entirely to literature. At the age of 36 Conrad settled down in England