Comparing Heart Of Darkness, By Camus, Carter, And Conrad

Many novels convey an unsettling relationship between humankind and the modern world for many reasons. Although most humans can recognize the benefits of the modern world, there’s a shared sense of understanding that there are also many repercussions as well as sacrifices. In particular, Camus’ The Stranger, Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness address mankind’s uneasy relationship with the modern world in various ways, even despite the fact that each text encompassed a distinct of time. With this in mind, Camus, Carter, and Conrad each convey humankind’s ambivalent connection to modernity through their use of representation, satire, and ignorance. To begin, Camus’ 1942 novel The Stranger conveys human being’s apprehensive relationship with the modern world is conveyed in Camus’ 1942 novel The Stranger by incorporating the jury to represent the values and intentions of society. For example, after questioning Meursault’s response to his mother’s death, the prosecutor accuses Meursault of “burying his mother with crime in his heart” (Camus 96). This allegation, in itself,

By way of illustration, when Marlow, the narrator, witnesses a warship fire into the passive wilderness of Africa, he states: “there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent… There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight; and it was not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me earnestly there was a camp of natives—he called them enemies—hidden out of sight somewhere” (Conrad 14). This instance is one of many in which Conrad displays the absurdity of Western colonialism. By highlighting the modern world in such a way, it depicts how the onset of the advanced stated of the world brought about feelings of anxiety and fear that were primarily devoid of