(toc) #title= (Table of Content)
Summary of Joseph Conard’s Heart of Darkness
T(caps)he novel begins with a description of nature, especially the Thames which connects Europe and Africa. The novelist states:
The Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing, the sea and sky were welded together without a joint (p. 65)
Marlow tells the story, recalls how the Romans brought light to the „dark‟ part of the world, not as colonists but conquerors. He explains how he had come in contact with colonisation, the picture of a long coiling river and how he intends to trade with the natives. He studied the map of the river, the mouth of which he arrived after a month, observes a group of black people walking up and down, “looks like they are dying” . Marlow meets the Chief Accountant, who tells him he will meet Mr. Kurtz who is in charge of the trading posts in the Ivory country. Marlow embarks on a “200 mile trek into the interior”, goes through the path, dwellings. His white companion is ill. Marlow is disgusted by his experience, the greed and brutal exploitation of the natives by the Ivory traders. At a Company Station, he hears about Mr. Kurtz who is at the station in the Ivory country. He takes a long trek into the interior to join the steamboat at the Central Station. He discovers that his boat is wrecked. Marlow completes the repair and sets off the dismissed Mr. Kurtz‟s assistant who is ill. Close to his destination, the boat is attacked by tribesmen and the helmsman is killed. At the inner station, a young Russian sailor tells Marlow of Kurtz‟s excellence and how he dominates the natives. Kurtz and general barbarity of the natives is exposed with heads displayed on stakes. Marlow attempts to return Kurtz back to the river, but he has been into the very heart of things, consumed, while dying, he speaks of the horror of things, and sends two packages through Marlow to deliver to his.
3.2 Themes
Some of the themes in Joseph Conrad‟s Heart of Darkness are discussed below:
3.2.1 Imperialism
The English novelist takes readers back to the days of imperialism in which the Thames, River Nile and other adjoining African waterways were used as escape routes to fulfill the English mission of exploration. The English is fully prepared for imperial mission in Africa, hence the Nellie is delicately anchored on the Nile with crew members of diverse professional callings: Accountant, manager and experienced administrators all for the purpose of Africa‟s exploration. The Nile is portrayed in the novel as aiding the crime of English imperialism:
The Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing, the sea and the sky were welded together (p. 65)
The narrator reminds us that the primary duty of the Captain is beyond the river, but within the brooding gloom, in the heart of darkness, his real destination, burdened with the responsibility to personify the English and link the Thames with African rivers and then the “gloom to the West” through the waterways leading to the uttermost end of the earth (p. 66).
3.2.2 Deception
Conrad reveals the crafty nature of imperial psychology of domination, which is visible in the category of men and the ship which bare impressive names. The names “like the jewels… flanks full of treasures and thus pass out of the gigantic tale of the Erebus and Terror bound on other conquests” (p. 67).
Such imperial expenditures have competent and experienced men in charge, Captains, admirals and commissioned generals of East India fleets. They are the “hunters of gold or pursuers of fame”, they all had gone out on that stream “bearing the sword and often the touch” (p. 67). Imperial structure is very strongly expressed in Conrad‟s Heart of Darkness.
3.2.3 Race and Racial Prejudice
The theme is obvious in Joseph Conrad‟s Heart of Darkness. Even from the title of the novel “darkness” connotes colour prejudice or hatred for the black race. The very Western objection to the black colour perhaps subjugates its owner and drives him to inhabit the remote end of the world, “peopled banks of the rivers” spread out in the tranquil dignity of the waterway, leading to the uttermost end of the earth. Such houses the miserable black colour but recedes from Western civilization and all kinds of God driven Western advancement. Racial hypothesis, we may say, is the main focus of the novel, even considering the invective descriptions with which blacks and the environment is labeled or addressed in the novel. Examples of such references are in words and phrases “ savagery”, “detestable”, “sulky”, “niggers”, “incomprehensible”, “mysterious”, “naked”, “a wilderness like a needle in a bundle of hay”, “cold in a cold fog:; “tempests”, “disease”, “exile and death sulking in the air”, “in the water”, “in the bush” . “They must have been dying like flies here” (p. 68).
All the descriptions hidden in words and phrases denote hatred, unwanted people whose ways are strange to civilization and may never experience it except to be left and forgotten in their disease invested environment.
3.2.4 Exploitation
The West embarked on imperial conquests and domination with the aim to amass wealth by exploiting foreign economy of nations subject to them. For instance, in Guinea Africa, they were attracted by the ivory in the “Wild Jungle” and the intention to trade with the blacks. For instance, the station manager and his uncle discuss how they could make use of the trading field to their advantage “since anything can be done in this country”. Thus, the novel reveals that to take advantage of Congo, Africa economically is a “continental concern”. Hence, the eagerness to develop the “company‟s business” is a keen desire since its imperative “to tear treasure out of the bowels of the earth, with no more moral purpose” (p. 99). To hunt of the ivory continent for heaps of deposit of ivory all suggest Europe‟s crazy exploitative tendency of the Congo.
3.2.5 Gender Discrimination
The novelist gets the male gender deeply involved in his narrative from the beginning to end, be it Europe‟s executors of God‟s will for the “savage” or “black things‟ in the dark “God forsaken jungle” of the Congo. Men were freely mentioned and used in the various positions in the novel. They got their own share of Europe‟s derogatory reference to the Black colour and the disease invested African environment in such remarks as “nigger”, “mysteries”, and savages. But women were rendered „invisible‟ or almost excluded in the mentioning for any serious roles in the novel, except for the one or two occasions that they were mentioned in passing. Such few instances are “knitting old woman with the cat obtruded herself upon my memory” (p. 142). “Set the women at work” (P. 143) “in truth,women lived in world of their own” (P. 145)
3.3 Style
Below is a discussion of the style of the novelist in Heart of Darkness.
3.3.1 Invective and Discriminatory Use of Language
Conrad uses reductive discriminatory and invective languages consciously in Heart of Darkness. Such phrases and words are “black thing”, “nigger mysteries”, “this has been one of the dark places of the earth”, “midst of incomprehensible”, “a place of darkness”, “old nigger”, “unknown”, “edge of a colossal jungle”, “so dark green”, “God-forsaken wilderness”, “horror-struck”, “bewitched”, “imperfect manners”, “impenetrable forest”, “heart of darkness”, “cannibals”, “white man‟s grave”, “savages”, “satanic litany”, “barren darkness”. The novelist consciously used selected words that dehumanises and demean the black race and everything that the colour, “black” represents. The reason is to lend weight to the theme of race and racial prejudice which is central to the novel.
3.3.2 Symbols and Symbolism
The idea of “darkness” in the novel symbolises the dreadful, evil colour of the black skin, the black race. The map is also an important symbol that guides Europeans into the jungle of Africa for exploration to unravel the mysteries, the geography of Africa.
3.3.3 Allusion
We observed a generous use of allusions in the novel. Examples of natural, classical, and geographical allusions used makes the novel sound like a school of oceanography, with word like “current”, “tide”, “sea „waterways”, “seas”, “sun”, “ sky”, “earth”, “river”, “congo basin”, “maps”, “latitude”, “lakes”, “Indian ocean”, “China”, “Eldorado”, “Empire”, “Mars”, “Jupiter”. These referents have been used to justify the thematic concern of the novel.
3.3.4 Language
The writer‟s choice of words is deliberately rendered in simple and familiar style, perhaps to justify the African setting of the novel. Hence the relativity of such words and expressions help reader ‟s easy comprehension of its ideas, especially as we realise that the novel‟s main theme is about imperialism. Its language is enriched with use of figures of speech like metaphor and simile. Instances of indirect comparisons in the novel are, “Thames stretched before us like the beginning of the interminable waterway” (simile) (p.65) “… a military camp lost in a wilderness like a needle in a bundle of hay” (simile) (p. 69).
Leave a comment behind