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Joseph Conrad – HEART OF DARKNESS
HEART OF DARKNESS 01
Joseph Conrad – HEART OF DARKNESS
Joseph Conrad – HEART OF DARKNESS
Joseph Conrad – HEART OF DARKNESS
Joseph Conrad – HEART OF DARKNESS
Joseph Conrad – HEART OF DARKNESS
Joseph Conrad – HEART OF DARKNESS
Joseph Conrad – HEART OF DARKNESS

Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad
LIKE NEW, PAPERBACK
Joseph Conrad
LIKE NEW, PAPERBACK

RM12.00

Timeless Vintage Fiction

ISBN 9781784871666
Book Condition LIKE NEW
Format PAPERBACK
Publisher Vintage Publishing
Publication Date 7/7/2016
Pages 176
Weight 0.13 kg
Dimension 17.8 × 11 × 1.8 cm
Availability: 5 in stock

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Description

Heart of Darkness (1899) is a novella by Polish-English novelist Joseph Conrad about a voyage up the Congo River into the Congo Free State in the heart of Africa.
 
Charles Marlow, the narrator, tells his story to friends aboard a boat anchored on the River Thames.
 
This setting provides the frame for Marlow’s story of his obsession with the ivory trader Kurtz, which enables Conrad to create a parallel between what Conrad calls “the greatest town on earth”, London, and Africa as places of darkness.
 
It is widely regarded as a significant work of English literature and part of the Western canon. The story tells of Charles Marlow, an Englishman who took a foreign assignment from a Belgian trading company as a ferry-boat captain in Africa.
 
Heart of Darkness exposes the myth behind colonization while exploring the three levels of darkness that the protagonist, Marlow, encounters–the darkness of the Congo wilderness, the darkness of the European’s cruel treatment of the natives, and the unfathomable darkness within every human being for committing heinous acts of evil.
 
Although Conrad does not give the name of the river, at the time of writing the Congo Free State, the location of the large and important Congo River, was a private colony of Belgium’s King Leopold II. Marlow is employed to transport ivory downriver.
 
However, his more pressing assignment is to return Kurtz, another ivory trader, to civilization, in a cover-up. Kurtz has a reputation throughout the region. This symbolic story is a story within a story or frame narrative.
 
It follows Marlow as he recounts from dusk through to late night, to a group of men aboard a ship anchored in the Thames Estuary his Congolese adventure.
 
The passage of time and the darkening sky during the fictitious narrative-within-the-narrative parallel the atmosphere of the story.
 
Central to Conrad’s work is the idea that there is little difference between so-called civilised people and those described as savages; Heart of Darkness raises questions about imperialism and racism.
 
Conrad described his tale this way: “A wild story of a journalist who becomes manager of a station in the (African) interior and makes himself worshipped by a tribe of savages. Thus described, the subject seems comic, but it isn’t.”
 
The story pivots on Charles Marlow, who while onboard a moored ship on the Thames River in London recounts to the narrator (and to the reader) his extraordinary journey up the Congo, thereby establishing straightaway, via the two rivers, contrasting symbols of the “civilized” West and “dark,” uncivilized Africa, respectively.
 
As Marlow explains, he was assigned by an ivory trading company to take command of a cargo boat stranded in the interior.
 
Making his way through treacherous jungle, he treks from the Outer Station to the Central Station and then up the river to the Inner Station, witnessing the brutalization of the natives by white traders along the way and hearing tantalizing stories of a Mr. Kurtz, the manager of the trading station and one of the company’s most successful collectors of ivory.
 
He hears that Mr. Kurtz is unwell, and so he sets off to find him. The long and slow passage through the African heartland fills Marlow with a growing sense of dread.
 
He and his company are attacked by African natives, and some of the crew are killed. Incrementally, Marlow learns more about the mysterious Kurtz—about his civilized traits (his painting, musical abilities, and great eloquence), his charismatic, god-like power over the natives, and the severed heads that surround his hut.
 
Upon finding him, Marlow concludes that, in this alien context, unbound by the strictures of his own culture, Kurtz had gone mad, become a bloody tyrant, and exchanged his soul and any humanitarian ideals he may have initially had upon his arrival in Africa for abject greed and power.
 
A mortal illness, however, is bringing his reign of terror to a close. As Kurtz dies, he whispers to Marlow, “The horror! The horror!”—seemingly acknowledging his encounter with human depravity, the heart of darkness.
 
Marlow returns to Belgium, delivers to the trading company Kurtz’s papers, including a report he had written for “The Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs” (but with Kurtz’s handwritten postscript—“Exterminate all the brutes!”—ripped off), and then visits Kurtz’s fiancée, to whom he lies about Kurtz’s final words, saying he died proclaiming her name. Marlow is disgusted with himself, his lie, and the whole experience.
 
This novella is astonishingly powerful and equally enigmatic. Its condemnation of Western imperialism—of the greed, violence, and exploitation that so often accompanies ventures to bring “light” and civilization to the “dark” and needy areas of the world—and its poignant look at the destructive influence of colonization on the colonized and colonizer alike, have been widely praised.
 
However, some postcolonial African writers, most notably Chinua Achebe, deemed the book racist for its portrayal of native African cultures. The varied interpretations only underscore the novel’s status as one of the most discussed and debated works of modern literature.

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