Heart of Darkness: Text to World

As nerdy as this may make me sound, I was excited when I started reading Heart of Darkness. After many summer weeks of reading frilly young adult books, it was a relief to actually read something where I couldn't predict the next sentence. ( I know it really is my own fault for liking them so much.) The excess of description and story-telling point of view had me right from the start. However, that didn't last for very long.

At the beginning, I got Marlow's fascination with Mr. Kurtz. Essentially, the man was there, being what Marlow wanted to become. However, the story leading up to the actual meeting of the two did nothing for me. It was simply a story where I could see no connections as to what it would mean in the future. For the most part I could follow what he was saying, but was bored and frustrated by it.

Mr. Kurtz himself was very interesting. Here was a man who worked in a world that was all about glory and wealth, and all he wanted to do was what he loved. Granted, his line of work wasn't exactly an admirable cause, but it is still interesting to see that he did it because he loved it, not because of popularity. Also, it was unexpected to see that Kurtz turned out to be very much like what he was described as. It often seems that people of great respect can be over-hyped until Marlow has such great expectations that nothing can ever be met. However, that didn't seem to happen, even though Marlow did start to hate Mr. Kurtz seemingly because of his own hallucinations.

As for the title, I'm still not completely set on what the actual idea was. There were many times that Conrad mentioned it in the book. Most of them seemed to talk about inner demons, but, to me, there just seemed to be more to it than that. Although that inner demon thing seems to go along well with many of the characters in the book: Mr. Kurtz, his assistant, some of the black helpers on the ship, the manager, Mr. Kurtz wife, and even Marlow himself. They all had time when they were fighting something in the outside world that conflicted with what they wanted or were used to in their hearts.

Since I read this book first, the marking in it is the best. I summarized a lot of paragraphs but this text was also very convnient to apply to the world. Mainly, I was able to make a lot of connections to how the world has changed in viewing people of a different race.

I probably never would have read this book on my own. But, now that I've gotten the chance to, I might just read it again.... in a long, long, long time. (Are you sensing a theme here?)