Next Book: Heart of Darkness
We will meet to discuss “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad on June 3rd at 7pm at the Alder’s home.
The following are some basic facts about the work I pulled from Sparknotes, just to give a gentle push out from the shore and start you up the river:
- Type of work · Novella (between a novel and a short story in length and scope)
- Time and place written · England, 1898–1899; inspired by Conrad’s journey to the Congo in 1890
- Date of first publication · Serialized in Blackwood’s magazine in 1899; published in 1902 in the volume Youth: A Narrative; and Two Other Stories
- Narrator · There are two narrators: an anonymous passenger on a pleasure ship, who listens to Marlow’s story, and Marlow himself, a middle-aged ship’s captain.
- Point of view · The first narrator speaks in the first-person plural, on behalf of four other passengers who listen to Marlow’s tale. Marlow narrates his story in the first person, describing only what he witnessed and experienced, and providing his own commentary on the story.
- Setting (time) · Latter part of the nineteenth century, probably sometime between 1876 and 1892
- Setting (place) · Opens on the Thames River outside London, where Marlow is telling the story that makes up Heart of Darkness. Events of the story take place in Brussels, at the Company’s offices, and in the Congo, then a Belgian territory.
- 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
- 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 versus 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
- Foreshadowing · Permeates every moment of the narrative—mostly operates on the level of imagery, which is consistently dark, gloomy, and threatening
