Heart Of Darkness By Joseph Conrad

“We live in the flicker—may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.” (Conrad 48) It seems that no matter what forms of light and good there is in the world; darkness is sure to follow. Throughout his narrative Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad uses his character Charlie Marlow to distinguish ideas, locations, events, and other phenomenon's using the terms darkness and light. Marlow enters Africa with the delusion of it being light and goodness. He is civilized, rational, innocent, plus in touch with his own reality; Africa on the other hand, is actually the home of darkness, it is barbaric—an unknown land of complete mystery, and yet, it is a symbol of the human condition. As the story develops Marlow

This is because Kurtz “is open about the fact that he does not trade, but rather takes ivory by force, and he describes his own treatment of the natives with the words “suppression” and “extermination”: he does not hide the fact that he rules through violence and intimidation. His perverse honesty threatens to expose the evil practices behind the Europeans actual activity in Africa.” (Sparknotes) Showing that even the so called “civilized” Europeans are full of secrecy (which is a symbol of darkness in itself) to fulfil “…a treacherous appeal to the lurking death, to the hidden evil, to the profound darkness of its (their) hearts.” (Conrad 87) Something about the land and its unknown inhabitants fills the Europeans with curiosity and fear all at the same time. “He began with the argument that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, ‘must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings—we approach them with the might of a deity.” (Conrad 111) Marlow has an amazing point here; the Europeans (whites) claim the natives to be savage because their culture is unknown to them, and the natives see the Europeans as savages because they came into their continent and began killing, enslaving, and beating them all because they were unfamiliar and “savage.” Humans’

The boy informs Marlow of Kurtz’s condition; he had been getting increasingly sicker by the day, and didn’t believe Mr. Kurtz would have much longer to live if he was not taken out of the station for medical assistance. Later in the night the young boy appeared again, this time, just looking for someone willing to listen to his story—Marlow obliged... Early in the prompt, the topic of secrecy was brought up; many claim a secret to be a dark crack that continues to grow and grow, and grow, until the person is left feeling poisoned by the secret itself. The poison of a secret is powerful it can leave the body and mind feeling as if an enormous amount of pressure has fallen upon it leaving a feeling of utter weakness. The boy had a secret much like this, eating away at his soul. According to the boy it had been Kurtz that had ordered the attack on the steamboat, he was so hell-bent on staying in his station to fulfill his own work that he told the natives to attack the steamer. Kurtz also brought a significant number of natives to the station to protect him in a manner of speaking. The natives of the land developed a strong liking towards Kurtz and they didn’t want him to leave them, and since Kurtz didn’t want to leave in the first place he thought it a logical plan to bring the tribe and attack the steamer in hopes of scaring off its crew