Heart of Darkness has been considered for most of this century as a literary classic, and also as a powerful indictment of the evils of imperialism. It reflects the savage repressions carried out in the Congo by the Belgians in one of the largest acts of genocide committed up to that time. Conrad’s narrator encounters at the end of the story a man named Kurtz, dying, insane, and guilty of … unspeakable atrocities.
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I loved pretty much every book that I read in high school (even though moaned and groaned about reading them at the time). So I had to do a Top 5 list instead of picking just one.
***Top 5 Favorite Books I Read in High School English***
1) Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
2) Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
3) Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
4) Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
5) Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Runners Up: Grendel by John Gardner, Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
#top5s
I read this in high school and immediately recognized it in Coppola’s film, “Apocalypse Now” and have since then recognized the message in real life. The story is about Marlowe traveling deep into the Congo jungle to locate Kurtz who is an ivory trader but is purported to have lost his mind and established himself as a God. One of the book’s messages was about how restraint is the thing that allows humans to behave civilly — a message that has recently become ever more apparent. A shallow read of the book might think that the Africans were the ones needing to be restrained and that they had corrupted Kurtz. But Kurtz himself was not only unrestrained, he represented the European colonists who had been trampling throughout the world for centuries and wreaking havoc of long established cultures.
Wonderfully atmospheric criticism of imperialism. Written in a revolutionary impressionistic style. The prose is beautiful and haunting. For me, this was a life-changing read. A classic!
As with Orwell’s 1984 Joseph Conrad’s timeless Heart of Darkness attempts to impart an incredibly important lesson to humanity. One that is definitely worth a fresh look at here in the summer of 2020 as we stare shaking our heads at the societal chaos currently going on around us. In the story a ship captain named Marlowe is hired by a Belgian trading company to take a boat up the Congo River to find one of their employees a man named Kurtz who they have lost contact with.
What Marlowe eventually finds out is that Kurtz ,a civilized European intellectual who had been sent in to the depths of the jungle to trade for ivory with a primitive tribes, has instead tossed away his civilized behavior to become a barbaric murderous god like tyrannical tribal leader.
Many have put forth the notion that this story is about the horrors of colonialism. They are wrong. Colonialism was horrible no doubt but that’s just part of the setting not the theme. Other’s like Francis Ford Coppolla (who updated the story in the famous film Apocolypse Now) gets a little closer when he sees the lesson of Kurtz losing his marbles as a metaphor for America losing it’s own mind in the blood bath of the Vietnam War. But even he misses the point.
The lesson imparted by Marlowe’s mysterious and strange and dangerous terrifying quest is that human civilized behavior is far more fragile then we civilized people realize. Within all of us under the thin blanket of our civilized notions lies a dark potential to happily engage in animalistic domination and bloody slaughter.
One of the main points of the story is that this horrific potential is not just in others. Not just those bad colonizing Europeans or those baddie policy makers in the American military or in famously bad people like Nero or Hitler or Jim Jones.
Conrad makes pains to show that in every single individual one of us is a bad seed ready and waiting to sprout under the right barbaric circumstances. No one is immune. Even our so called intellectual class.
Or maybe they are especially vulnerable to this deadly and evil folly, Conrad seems to suggest as Kurtz himself before going stone cold serial killer nuts was an intellectual as well!
Once you realize this you can hear the loud and clear echo of Kurtz’s horrible folly in the voice of every present broadcast voice who has looked upon the animalistically barbaric destruction of our cities with anything other than baffled wide eyed horror and disgust. Cops are dead. Police precincts burned. Protestors have had their heads crushed under toppled over statues.
As I write this a portion of Seattle apparently has been cordoned off by protesters and there is an actual warlord in charge. The Kurtz like confused mayor of the city instead of following our civilized law and jailing everyone involved (or perhaps immediately sending them all to mental institutions) has instead sent in porta potties and food to help them continue their delusion that anarchy, brutality and insanity are viable alternatives to lawful peace and justice.
Many news broadcasters do not seem to have a problem with this incredibly strange new (and completely illegal) mode of municipal policy.
Some of their guests have even opined that arson and looting is not real violence. Would they still retain this curious opinion one wonders if they were suddenly robbed or all their possessions or if the structure they reside in was suddenly engulfed in flames?
Perhaps they would. As Conrad has struggles to warn us here in his classic story, perhaps the depths of human folly are bottomless after all.
Spoiler alert to our modern Kurtz like intellectual class who are currently giddily and dangerously flirting with barbarity and horror, it doesn’t end well.
Kurtz (like Hitler and Jim Jones) after their fool hardy trip into the heart of darkness dies quite horribly in bitterness and regret at the end.
Although not an easy book to read, I liked it very much. Even though I had to read this book for a class, I learned a lot about human nature and the evil in everyone’s hearts.