Thursday, March 26, 2015
Prompt 12
In Joseph Conrad's, Heart of Darkness, there is a sense of moral ambiguity present in the speaker. As Marlow travels through the wilderness of Africa, he sees many twisted subjects. He sees the exhaustion and wildness in the natives; he sees the European corruption; but, even more he has trouble finding the distinction. He finds the line between civilized people and wild people is very thin. In the writing, Conrad conveys this mysterious ambiguity in his complex writing style. As I read through the novel, I had difficulty keeping at times, difficulty focusing. In many ways this conveys the reaction of the speaker to his surroundings. The cultural immersion that took place was disorienting for Marlow, a sensation overload. There was such a vast input of information that it became all the more difficult for him to focus. Conrad conveys this ingeniously to the reader, by making the reader feel that same kind of confusion, that same feeling of being overloaded with information. I had to keep up with the words as a reader. Each word mattered and it was easy get disoriented by the amount of information given. A major theme of the book is simply the inability to cast any real judgment, there is the stated: us (civilization) and them (native Africans), but the fact is that when it comes down to it, both are human beings.
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I agree that the narrator is ambiguous, the narrator in this story is an outside person retelling a story that he heard from Marlow. The narrative structure in Conrad's novel is very complicated as it seems that there is constantly another layer to this story. It is a story inside of a story so everything that is told to the reader is already secondhand information and not firsthand experience. This leads to another layer of ambiguity because it makes the reader question whether these events actually happened in the story or if they are simply fabrications made up through rumors.
ReplyDeleteI agree that this novel deals with the idea of judgement and the ideals of evil. It is one the key pieces and messages of the novel. To much people focus on the ideals of racism and feminism when underneath all those issues there's lessons on how to deal with the human conditions, and how the men on the journey learned to deal and cope with that. This book discussed something that was not a common thing to write about at this time period.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your view that the Heart of Darkness deals with a darkness or evil, along with numerous occurances of judgments. However, I enjoy how you put that the distinguishing between civilized people and wild is a very slim line. Thus showing that truthfully there is not a difference, all people should be viewed equally. Yet I do realize also that this is hard to write about considering the time period. Also, I agree with how you noticed that the narrator appeared to be in secondhand information, none of it appeared to be a first hand experience. However, the noticeable part of your blog was that all people, civilized or wild, are human beings. That is how it should be truly viewed.
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