Heart of Darkness, a novel by Joseph Conrad, was originally a three-part series in Blackwood's Magazine in 1899. It is a story within a story, following a character named Charlie Marlow, who recounts his advanture to a group of men onboard an anchored ship. The story told is of his early life as a ferry boat captain. Although his job was to transport ivory downriver, Charlie develops an interest in investing an ivory procurement agent, Kurtz, who is employed by the government.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Must be read more than once,
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This review is from: Heart of Darkness (Hardcover)
Briefly Heart of Darkness is a must read classic. Most everyone knows the plot which was the basis for the movie "Apocalypse Now." What is the Heart of Darkness of the title? Is it mysterious Africa itself in the 1890's at the height of the Colonial period; the dehumanization of the African natives at the hands of Europeans in the pretext of "improving" them: or the depravity lying just below the surface of civilized men such as Kurtz, the cultured, most capable object of narrator Marlowe's voyage up the Congo River to its last post. This is a voyage that must be taken more than once by the reader to fully experience Conrad's sense of just what it feels like to experience this exotic, threatening, luxurious, mysterious and mostly surprising world.
This is merely a workable edition. I chose it just because it was hardback and inexpensive. It contains no extras. No introduction, appendix, essays, etc. Just the text. Other editions contain additional stories by Conrad such as the Secret Sharer and or introductions which many readers may find helpful. This edition is fine if you just want the story and nothing else. By the way the cover art is atrocious.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Vintage or Vapid?,
By Amy Michaelson (Franklin, MA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Heart of Darkness (Hardcover)
Though Joseph Conrad's famous novella, Heart of Darkness, can teach us much about human nature, it can also very easily put us to sleep. The powerful characters and their intriguing motives Conrad expresses in his novella opened our eyes to the extreme lengths people will go to in order to climb the social ladder ultimately becoming "top dog". It also exposed us to the harsh and often over-looked world of African racism in its rawest and truest form. This concept was quite new to us considering all we have previously been taught about racism was the overexposed aspect of racism in United States history. If only Conrad had made his writing as exciting and interesting as the in-depth themes he conveyed in Heart of Darkness, perhaps more readers would discover it in all its glory.
A constant struggle for power is an underlying theme throughout Conrad's novella. It is interesting to watch the development of characters as their thirst for power strengthens. The Manager, for example, becomes more and more distressed and desperate to overpower Marlow each time Marlow opposes one of the Manager's decisions. For example, in Part I of the novella, Conrad describes the rational behind the French's violence toward a seemingly harmless area on the coast. After the French bombarded the area, "nothing happened. Nothing could happen" (Conrad 79). It is obvious the French were not fighting for protection, but solely to demonstrate their dominance over the Natives they fear. This relationship is a fascinating study of human nature, and is very relatable to today's society. Nowadays, it is not uncommon for people to become so blinded by their desires, that they reach the point where they no longer remember why they desired it in the first place. Conrad's characters show us that the greed and yearning for supremacy seen in his book is actually much more common in our lives than we first assume. If you were to ask anyone in our age group about racism nine times out of ten they would respond with a fact or figure dealing with racism as a part of United States history, especially topics of slavery. Very little is taught about racism in other forms and in other locations. Heart of Darkness portrays a society in which the ones that are oppressed by racism are, not only, the people native to the land, but also the majority. After seeing the way the European settlers imposed their own society and beliefs upon the natives, it reminded us that racism and domination are not only seen in minority groups. As famed author Chinua Achebe tells us in his critique titled "An Image of Africa", Conrad sets his novel up in a way that "foils Africa to Europe" (Achebe 1). Despite the surface differences between Europe and Africa, there is an underlying consistency in human nature to fear those who appear foreign and "strange". This leads the Europeans to have the desire to control their foils, the Natives. The invading Belgium travelers oppressed the people native to the land solely because of their skin color. After investigation, it is obvious this prevalent theme can be easily found in the history of our own country, The Unites States. This unique form of racism can be found as far back in our own country's history as the way the first pilgrims arriving on the Mayflower treated the Native Americans despite the pilgrims having a smaller population. Despite the great educational and psychological aspects of the story we found it intolerably boring, complicated and complex. The writing was unnecessarily wordy, often times confusing us rather than conveying a story. We also found that there was a gratuitous amount of description throughout the story. Again, the extra and unneeded words often sidetracked us from the actual plot. The story line was full of unneeded fluff and pieces that did nothing to move the story along. We also were not fond of the frame narration literary style. It added further confusion to the plot and we did not see any particular benefits. Overall, we would not recommend Heart of Darkness to anyone looking for a light enjoyable read. For those looking for a story enriched with themes and new ways of seeing a society you thought you knew, then this may be the perfect book for you!
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Mistah Kurtz--he dead." An influential work on five 20th century seminal works,
This review is from: Heart of Darkness (Hardcover)
I read this book for a graduate Humanities course. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, written in 1899 is a seminal work about the ills of colonialism, as well as a postmodern look at the subject of mankind. Conrad's book had a crucial influence on five important works of the twentieth century: J. G. Frazier's book The Golden Bough. Jessie L. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, T. S. Elliott's poem the Waste Land, Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, and Francis Ford Coppolla's movie Apocalypse Now, screenplay by John Milius, was based on Conrad's book. Another interesting fact is that this work was read by Orson Welle's Mercury Theater Players on the radio and was to be his first movie. After doing some work on it he abandoned the project to do Citizen Kane! I would have loved to of seen what Welles could have done with this story. Conrad's story is so riveting in part, because he himself served as a riverboat captain. High school teachers and college professors who have discussed this book in thousands of classrooms over the years tend to do so in terms of Freud, Jung, and Nietzsche; of classical myth, Victorian innocence, and original sin; of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism.
Just a taste of the plot reels you in! Marlow, the narrator of Heart of Darkness and Conrad's alter ego, is hired by an ivory-trading company to sail a steamboat up an unnamed river whose shape on the map resembles "an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country and its tail lost in the depths of the land" (8). His destination is a post where the company's brilliant, ambitious star agent, Mr. Kurtz, is stationed. Kurtz has collected legendary quantities of ivory, but, Marlow learns along the way, is also rumored to have sunk into unspecified savagery. Marlow's steamer survives an attack by blacks and picks up a load of ivory and the ill Kurtz; Kurtz, talking of his grandiose plans, dies on board as they travel, downstream. Sketched with only a few bold strokes, Kurtz's image has nonetheless remained in the memories of millions of readers: the lone white agent far up the great river, with his dreams of grandeur,his great store of precious ivory, and his fiefdom carved out of the African jungle. Perhaps more than anything, we remember Marlow, on the steamboat, looking through binoculars at what he thinks are ornamental knobs atop the fence posts in front of Kurtz's house and then finding that each is "black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids-a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth" (57). I especially became interested in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness from the movie Apocalypse Now. There is a scene in the movie that shows Colonel Kurtz's nightstand in his cave. T. S. Elliott's poem the Waste Land is one of three books on the nightstand. The other two are Jessie L. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, and J. G. Frazier's book The Golden Bough. Anyone wanting to understand the movie Apocalypse Now, especially the character of Colonel Kurtz, and what Milius and Copolla are trying to tell their audience need to read these three books as well as Conrad's Heart of Darkness! As a graduate student reading in philosophy and history I recommend this book for anyone interested in literature, myth, history, philosophy, religion and fans of Apocalypse Now.
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