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Essay Comparing Heart Of Darkness And Notes Of A Native Son

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From a distance, most reader of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son may surmise that the two texts are not connected in the slightest. Heart of Darkness follows a white European, Marlow, as he travels deep into the African jungle in search of Kurtz, a man Marlow has never meet but captivated with immensely. On the other hand, Notes of a Native Son is a set of non-fiction essays written by James Baldwin about his life and experiences being an African American living in the United States as he narrates events in his life that had an impact on him and his thinking. Still, a quick synopsis still raises questions on how the two texts relate to one another, but an in-depth analysis uncovers that both texts are connected by a single word, “change”. Reading thoroughly through each text, the reader can witness the …show more content…

The reader assumes when first beginning the novel that the heart of darkness only means the African jungle in which Marlow is traveling through to encounter Kurtz. However, it also symbolizes the darkness that lies in each person that is masked by civilized society. Knowing this information when the text said, “We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness…the steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy” (Conrad 44) it means that the farther and longer that Marlow and Kurtz stayed in the African jungle, the more opportunity for their heart of darkness to exhibited itself and change who they were beforehand. Marlow and Kurtz both left their home and civilized society in England to a savage and uncultured country in Africa; this shift for one location to another allowed the character to experience more of the world they live in, which caused them to change over the course of time and alienate them from their past life and

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