Insanity In Joseph Conrad's Heart Of Darkness '

The human mind is a being 's reasoning and thoughts. Your mind can make you hear, see, or think things that aren’t actually there. One could easily get lost in their own mind. APA President Philip G. Zimbardo, PhD, believes, “Just about any ordinary person can slip into madness. In fact, all it may take to trigger the process is a special kind of blow to one 's self-image to push someone over the edge of sanity.”. The novella, The Heart of Darkness, shows just how a perfectly sane person can go insane by just one journey. The physical journey, Marlow and his crew indoor to find Kurtz, represents one’s mind by there being three main parts of the brain and three stations to stop, the deeper you go the more you lose yourself, and using each

He is very low, very low, ' he said. He considered it necessary to sigh, but neglected to be consistently sorrowful. 'We have done all we could for him - haven 't we? But there is no disguising the fact, Mr. Kurtz has done more harm than good to the Company. He did not see the time was not ripe for vigorous action. Cautiously, cautiously - that 's my principle. We must be cautious yet. The district is closed to us for a time. Deplorable! Upon the whole, the trade will suffer. I don 't deny there is a remarkable quantity of ivory – mostly fossil. We must save it, at all events – but look how precarious the position is – and why? Because the method is

While Marlow travels on his journey to Kurtz, we readers can see, alongside Marlow, that the deeper they travel along the congo, the more deranged and bizarre everything and everyone gets. When the boat arrives at the outer station, we meet the accountant which is rather bizarre because he is a nice, clean-cut man that is dressed his nicest. Marlow says with confusion, “When near the buildings I met a white man, in such an unexpected elegance of get-up that in the first moment I took him for a sort of vision” (12), with “Strings of dusty niggers with splay feet arrived and departed; a stream of manufactured goods, rubbishy cottons, beads, and brass-wire set into the depths of darkness, and in return came a precious trickle of ivory” (11). When Marlow didn’t expect it, once they got to the central station, things only got more bizarre. There is the brickmaker that Marlow knows can’t actually be a brickmaker because the central station has no hay to make bricks. Not only is there no hay for the supposed brickmaker, but there are no rivets for Marlow to fix the boat. This is extremely outlandish to Marlow since the outer station had them just thrown around everywhere your eyes could see. While multiple people and things got a little more bizarre than the last stop, nothing compares to Marlow’s last stop of the journey, the inner station. The inner station more bizarre qualities than both the outer and central stations combined. Let’s start with the crazy natives.