Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

I had to read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness for my University degree and will admit that I personally found it quite tough going, despite the book being ever so short in length, 111 pages in fact. After writing a 2000 word essay on a particular aspect of the book however I found myself being drawn into the story and have know come to if not like at least respect the book. When Marlow was a young child he would spend hours staring at the blanks spaces on maps and when he found one that particularly interested him would exclaim 'When I grow up I want to go there'. Now older he still has a passion for adventure and despite the fact that those once empty ...  Read the complete review

Leopold, the playboy King of the Belgians, grabbed his share of the African cake at the 1884 Berlin Conference with promises of Christian charity and the abolishment of an Arab run slave trade. He delivered hell to his personal fiefdom, and a 23-year rule in which the population of his Congo Free State declined as quickly as his bank balance swelled and the official records burnt. Joseph Conrad, born to the landless aristocracy in the Polish Ukraine, came to the Congo in 1890, spending six months on a Congo River steamer. An orphaned child of revolution, but a naturalized son of Empire, he came to witness Leopold?s great civilization and found instead "the vilest ...  Read the complete review

I was not particularly interested in this book when I was forced to pick it up and read it, although I had seen Apocalypse Now a while before and remembered enjoying it. Having quite a low attention span (a bad thing if you’re doing an English degree) I had to concentrate quite hard on this book, but perseverance meant that before long I was enjoying this much more than I ever expected. Conrad’s novel traces the journey of Marlow, the narrator, into the Congo. It takes the form of a story within the narrative which is told on a ship in the river Thames, the result being the mixture of the two cultures; civilised and colonised, and their implicit threat of ...  Read the complete review

This novella has one of the highest ratio of meaning per page, the text is only 106 pages long, yet you can get interpretations which are many times longer than the original! Let’s look closely at the text without referring to loads of background information and see if we can find out what it is about. Like many novellas (a piece of literature longer than a short-story but shorter than a novel) ‘Heart of Darkness’ has a frame, in fact it has two frames with two narrators, the first is an anonymous passengers on a pleasure ship lying at anchor in the mouth of the Thames who listens, together with some other men, to Marlow whose business on board isn’t quite ...  Read the complete review

Take a journey through a tunnel - a tunnel of intermittent light, strange creatures, strange landscape and strange companions. Is this a journey through the jungles of the Congo River, or a journey to the heart of the human soul? What will you find at the end of such a journey - ivory, riches, experience - or the true nature of humanity? Well according to Joseph Conrad what you find on both counts is "The horror! The horror!" Heart of Darkness, written by Joseph Conrad at the turn of the twentieth century has become one of the seminal pieces of English literature. Conrad, an exile from Polish Ukraine, whose true name was Jozef Korzeniowski (I like ...  Read the complete review