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| Customer Reviews |
Average Rating: 
Rating: - Powerful stuff
I'd always heard that "Apocalypse Now" drew plot elements from "Heart of Darkness", but didn't realize just how closely it was based. After HOD, it will be fun to watch that movie again. Sentence by sentence, this book resonates with the sound of classic literature. I'm a fan of eloquent wordsmithery, and Conrad was a master. Having read this independently, I probably didn't pick up on all of the symbolism or social commentary about European colonialism. However, the essential themes are clear and persuasively shown: the corruption of power and the potential in humankind for regression to savagery when social inhibitions are absent - much like "Lord of the Flies", which another reviewer astutely noted. Beyond the meanings, I think it works very well as a dark adventure narrative, building premonitions of disaster as Marlow journeys deeper into the continent and closer to the mythical Kurtz. My only criticism echoes many previous reviews: the encounter with a weakened Kurtz is anticlimactic and leaves the reader hungry for demonstrations of the great man's warped charisma.
Rating:  - The brooding gloom of an accursed inheritance.
The words, "brooding" and "gloom" appear in four of the first five paragraphs of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Why this mood? It was the pessimism gripping England late in the 19th century brought on by Darwin's startling revelations and the subsequent realization that perhaps mankind is not God's chosen. Conrad seasons the narrative with images of evolution. The story is told aboard a yacht at anchor, riding out the tide in the Thames, a waterway that led "to the uttermost ends of the earth," even "to the night of the first ages." Scientists speak of early man as if he lived long ago, but Marlow, the narrator, guides the reader to him on a "sea of inexorable time" to the other "end of countless ages . . . to the beginning of time." The journey itself is a voyage to Africa and up the Congo River in search of ivory. There Marlow encounters Kurtz, once the prodigy, now thoroughly corrupted by the horror of an encounter with the "appalling face of a glimpsed truth." Heart of Darkness truly ranks among the greatest of English language novels.
Rating: - another one of Marlows inconclusive tales
To me the most intriguing aspect of Conrads fiction is his use of invented narrators because the invented narrator lends his stories a peculiar subjectivity. For Heart of Darkness he uses Marlow. By using Marlow to tell the tale Conrad can both relate his story and show the effect such a tale has on its teller. But Marlow is not the only teller as Conrad himself occupies a place outside the tale, an authorial space, and he is free to comment on both teller and tale from another vantage point altogether. I think this priveleged positioning is akin to the place of the audience in classic theatre. To Aristotle the great advantage of theatre was that the audience member could learn the lessons of the characters on stage without having to go through their experiences in the real world.
I think it is interesting that some professors teach this book as a cautionary tale using Kurtz as an example of what happens when one goes outside the ranks of (white)civilization. While others read Kurtz's story as an indictment of that civilization because Kurtz is just doing what other colonizers are doing but in a more extreme way. Kurtz has simply given up the pretense that the white man is bringing "civilization" to Africa. Kurtz's madness is one in the same with the madness that belies any such colonial endeavor. It is dehumanizing to both the colonizer and the colonized and that is perhaps the point that makes this a great tale.
Marlow remains puzzled by the whole thing to the very end. Africa has obviously gone to work on his imagination as the most powerful passages are his ruminations about the primal past he has journeyed into, but as well as journeying into the past he has journeyed into the "heart of darkness" which is not the same thing as the heart of Africa, but rather the heart of man. Conrad uses Marlow brilliantly to show how difficult it is to reconcile civilization with his profound knowledge of human nature. Marlows way of keeping things in balance is to tell the tale of Kurtz and other tales, as we are told that this is "another one of Marlows inconclusive tales".
By using the invented narrator as the main character Conrad is able to tell two stories at once, Kurtz's and Marlow's. The way Marlow tells the story is inconclusive for it is never clear just what makes one man stop short at the invisible and perhaps merely imaginary, though necessary, perimeters that we call civilization & another cross over them.
But it should not be overlooked that although Kurtz is an obvious example of colonialisms excesses, all those in the process of extracting ivory from central Africa were committing a violation upon the African people. The Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe has written an essay in which he calls Conrad a racist. I don't think that is true but Achebe in his books offers a valuable and contrasting vision of Africa remarkably different than the one in Conrads book. Achebe writes of the Igbo tribe which lived very near the region "Heart of Darkness" takes place in. In Things Fall Apart he describes the very peaceful Igbo tribe and how it was forever destroyed by the arrival of the white colonists.
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