Conrad

Materie:	Appunti
Categoria:	Lingue
Voto:	1 (2)
Download:	70
Data:	30.07.2001
Numero di pagine:	3
Formato di file:	.doc (Microsoft Word)

The Plot:
The story is introduced by a narrator who is listening to Marlow. Marlow is a middle-aged English sailor, who, on board a boat on the Thames, tells a group of friends what happened to him on an ivory-collecting journey up the Congo river. As he moves towards the interior he witnesses the cruel exploitation of the natives by the white ivory-traders. He also hears of Kurtz, the best agent of the Company, who sends in as much ivory as the other agents put together. At the Central Station, where he has to stop for some time to repair the boat, Marlow learns that Kurtz has fallen ill and that he wiIl have to relieve the sick man who lives at the Inner Station of the Company. After a difficult journey through a mysterious, threatening jungle, Marlow reaches the station where he meets Kurtz. The wilderness has had a devastating effect on the man's soul and the civilised trader has been transformed into a figure of evil worshipped by some of the natives as a god. On the way back down the river Kurtz dies.

Text1:
- (What difficulties...?) He finds some difficult in finding the right way and avoiding hidden bends and reefs.
- The inner truth means the reality of stillness of an implacable force
- The narrator uses personification to describe nature
- The scenery is a primeval world where one feels cut off from civilization.
- The atmosphere is gloomy, sinister and suggesting danger.
- The attitude of the white man to the African wilderness is ambivalent. African nature is a hostile supernatural force but at the same time affascinates the white man.
- Marlow feels he is travelling in a primeval world; he senses he get lost in the forest; he senses the spell of the wilderness; he doesn’t understand his force; he feels threatened by that vendicative force.
- The language is figurative; In fact the novelist uses metaphores.
- The forest stands for dark areas of human heart.

THE MAN AND THE NOVELIST

- His novels deal with adventures in exotic countries. These, far from being romantic, are usually ordeals in which a character has to grapple both with hostile external forces and his own inner nature.
- In Heart of Darkness, during his journey up the Congo, Marlow has to face difficulties connected with the wild nature of the environment and the hostility both of the white and black people he meets which put his moral strength and self-control to the test. At the end he is not fighting the wilderness outside but rather the spell that Kurtz's personality has cast over him. The title of the novel refers then both to Africa, the dark continent, and to the darkness of the human heart.

- Heart of Darkness is a very complex novel that is considered an enquiry into the nature of and a denunciation of European colonialism in Africa.

- In the light of psicoanalytic reading, it is a journey into the unconscious. It represents a voyage bacward into the savage, primeval state of man that eventually civilization has succeededin in repressing and keeping under control.

- The terrible unknown force in man's psyche is reflected also in the African landscape. In the first text, the river and the “impenetrable” forest surrounding it, its silence and stillness, separate Marlow from everything he knows. Lurking behind this primeval world, untamed by civilization, he perceives a force that threatens him. He senses he can lose his way in that wilderness. The use of personification and figurative language in the description emphasises the terrible uneasiness the narrator feels in the presence of that force whose “inscrutable intention” he cannot figure out but whose spell he strongly feels.