Heart of Darkness tells a story in a story. It starts with a group of passengers boarding a boat floating on the Thames. One of them, Charlie Marlow, told his fellow sailors about his experience on another river, the Congo River in Africa. Marlowe's story begins with what he calls a tomb city, somewhere in Europe. There, the company appointed him captain of a river steamer. He was optimistic about what he would find and began to travel to Africa. There are two main character of the story, both are kind, nice normal people, but because of degeneration and corruption from multiple reasons, they changed to completely different kind of people. Marlow resisted the lure and stayed himself, but another character, kurtz, become a tyrant and finally died in extreme horror.
In the book, The author Conrad uses modernist expression techniques to show the readers the theme that human individuality is subverted, materialized and alienated under the prosperous appearance of high-speed industrialization. During With the development of the Industrial Revolution, the British economy has made a qualitative leap. The overseas colonies are dozens of times larger than the local colonies, covering every corner of the world. The expanding colonial area has intensified the British people's pursuit of the materialistic world, and their lonely and confused spiritual consciousness is spreading one by one. In Heart of Darkness, Conrad used the story of maritime colonization to describe the lonely consciousness of individual existence in this state of spiritual confusion in an all-round and multi perspective way.
The different African experiences of Marlowe and Kurtz exactly reflect the two narrative clues adopted by the author around a theme in the novel narrative. One is about Marlowe's journey to the African jungle, and the other is about Kurtz's depravity and evil. The two story clues go hand in hand, forming two different voices, and jointly revealing the moral theme of discovery in the novel. At the same time, Conrad also adopts the method of alternating narration between two first person "I", ingeniously changing the narrative perspective, and endowing the characters with two equally valuable independent voices. One is the narrator "I" who provides the overall story framework of the novel; The other is the narrator Marlowe, who stops to talk with "I" from time to time during the narrative process, in which he unfolds memories and tells Kurtz's experience. This makes the characters more realistic and stereoscopic, showing great skill of the writer.
What is the "heart of darkness"? In fact, it means many things. The so-called "darkness" not only symbolizes the dark African jungle, but also symbolizes the primitive, poverty, ignorance, backwardness, barbarism, and disease of Africa in the eyes of Europeans. It also symbolizes the hardships, terror, and danger of the visitors along the way. It also symbolizes the barbaric plunder and cruel rule of the colonists in Africa. The book mentions the word "darkness" many times, describing the degeneration of civilization and the crisis of human nature all the time. The "heart" in the same title symbolizes not only the beautiful African continent, but also the evil, cruel, greedy and cruel twisted mind of European colonialists after they lost the moral restraint. It also symbolizes the heart of introspection that helps awaken Malo's conscience, and it also symbolizes that European colonialists, under the banner of helping the African people spread civilization, exercised cruel rule over the African people.
Heart of Darkness insight and reveals the common shortcomings of the whole human nature, that is, the inherent and universal stubborn disease of human nature - evil, which is exactly what the "heart of darkness" is intended to express. The main value of the whole novel is to reflect on human nature, explore human soul and call for human morality.
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