Read and rank the following introductions and explain your criteria for ranking them. Be prepared to discuss.
Adam and Eve
A. The Nile and Congo are the stages upon which Marlow’s ego subconsciously performs it struggle. But in the end, Marlow frees himself of his nightmare once his subconscious desires and needs, governed by the id, are fulfilled. Moreover, it is this idea of “wish-fulfillment” that Fredrick Karl explains Kurtz’s significant impact on Marlow’s id. For it is within Kurtz that Marlow is able to find truth and meaning. Essentially, it is from his oppressive tyranny that Marlow is able to free himself of the absurd hypocrisy of the imperialistic Europeans along with the oppressive of ways of the society in which he lived.
Dreaming of Death
B. Dreams have existed ever since the emergence of human kind. The experience of envisioned images, sounds, and other sensations during sleep channels from our inner conscience, which, unlike our body, never goes to sleep. Conrad’s “Heart Of Darkness” relays the story of a man named Marlow but through Freud’s “Psychoanalytic Criticism” the entire novel can be interpreted as a dream.
Incredible or Inhumane: The truth behind Kurtz
C. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness exhibits Marlow’s journey to the center of darkness to rescue the notorious Kurtz from his death. However, the deeper Marlow travels into the heart of Africa, the more he fascinates over Kurtz, shedding light to Kurtz as a symbol of the jungle and as a god-like figure to his ‘disciples’. Moreover, as Marlow travels thicker into the chaotic jungle, the more he hears about Kurtz as a person, as a superior, and as a controller, thus revealing what seems like the harsh, intense reality. However, in actuality, there is an ”absurd gap between what we profess to be and what we are” (Karl, 125), and such applies perfectly to the appearance of Kurtz versus the reality of Kurtz. As Marlow arouses about his fascination of Kurtz, he never discovers who he really is, thus only understanding what he ‘seems’ to be. Therefore, the way Kurtz is introduced to Marlow not only creates obsession and compulsion by Marlow and his other followers, but also an invisible gap between who Kurtz really is and who Kurtz wants to be. Therefore, throughout Marlow’s journey, he discovers who Kurtz appears to be – a leader, a controller, and a god-like figure to his followers. However, when Marlow actually encounters Kurtz, his true character is revealed as one of a weak, hollow man.
Analysis of Kurtz’s Leadership and Power: Success or Failure?
D. Power and control in the hands of a single individual can be utilized in different ways and result in different outcomes. It can be overused or undermined, understood or misinterpreted, extreme or lenient, appreciated or despised, and ultimately lead to success or failure. Kurtz, a talented and charismatic individual, is the chief of the inner station inside of the Congo. The way in which Kurtz exercises his power is skeptical, and has led many analysts to examine the conception of Conrad’s intriguing and dubious character (Kurtz) and the purpose of his distinct role in Heart of Darkness. There are three main topics to address when discussing Kurtz’s rise to power in the Congo. The first is how he obtained his power. The second topic is how he is able to sustain his power, and the third is why he is able to exercise his power. Through the critiques ‘Psychoanalytic Criticism’ and ‘What is Psychoanalytic Criticism?’, Karl and Murfin discuss Kurtz’s authority in the Congo and whether his actions as a leader are appropriate, justified, or necessary.
Pillars of Salt: A Freudian Analysis of False Idolism and Unconscious Influence in Heart of Darkness
E. A man is at constant struggle with his sub-conscious urges. Through repression, these urges are forgotten and hidden from sight. This constant repression invariably leads to an "absurd gap between what we profess to be and what we are". This "gap" is a main theme in the novella Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad. Conrad presents a world in which oppression of the true self does not exist and people are free to live out the life of the man that lies in their id. The Congo is a world in which there is no societal construct and every man lives out whichever role they see fit. Ambition becomes unchecked and the "gap" begins to grow deeper. Fear clouds the senses and, almost as a defense mechanism, unconscious influence begins to dictate our actions, unknowingly altering our way of life. Furthermore, a sense of false idolism pervades throughout the novella, presenting itself in many different manners, from Kurtz and his followers to ivory all the "pilgrims" seem to be seeking. Marlow, being the main vehicle through which the story is experienced, contributes to both of these themes by presenting foil to Kurtz, who exemplifies what a man under duress can experience in terms of moral degradation. Therefore, Marlow is meant to contribute to both themes of false idolism and unconscious influence as both a foil and example.
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: Superego, Written by Evil
F. In Heart of Darkness, Conrad seeks to deal with basic part of human consciousness, the difference between good and evil. Over many centuries, various religious philosophies have been derived from the concept that good and evil are unarguably indivisible. Freud’s analysis of the superego judged what is moral and immoral behavior, questioning whether or not good and evil are basic and innate or rather subjective interpretations. However, the superego also possesses the ability to rationalize hideous behavior. Thomas Jefferson exemplifies this rationalization as he was ironically named the champion of unalienable rights and yet he possessed slaves up until his death. His superego evidently created circumstances that allowed Jefferson to justify his immoral behavior. Similarly, Marlow and Kurtz live in the age of British imperialism, where subjugation and use of colonies throughout the world was justified by English supremacy. By modern standards, we view such conduct as evil. Therefore, Conrad’s novel identifies the superego as arbiter of morality, a fact that Kurtz and Marlow attempt to escape. Ultimately, they discover the same conclusion- evil is absolute and inexorable.
Not as Clear as Black and White: Marlow’s Journey to Chaos
G. Black is bad. White is good. If only it were that simple for Marlow’s journey to the Heart of Darkness. In Conrad’s novel the symbolic meaning of white and black are constantly changing and lack consistency. There is a certain ambiguity with the color images in the novel and a lot of the time the symbols are the opposite of their typical meaning. The ambiguity with the color falls into the general theme of the novel because most elements of Heart of Darkness are vague and perplexing. Along side the inconsistent color symbolism, at the start of the novel Marlow seems more controlled with his tale, however as the story progresses the reader sees more of his indecisiveness and internal struggle as he looks into Marlow’s subconscious while utilizing Frederick Karl’s work as a reference. As a reader we must analyze Marlow’s psyche to truly find some clarity as he travels to chaos. At first glance, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness seems to make use of atypical color symbolism, specifically with white and black, by switching their connotation to the opposite of what is expected: usually white symbolizing purity and cleanliness and black symbolizing a more sinister mood. However, as the novel progresses, there is a very evident inconsistency and ambiguity with the colors which Fredrick Karl comments on and we can trace the same ambiguity in Marlow’s mental state.
The Heart of African Darkness And The Blinding Light of Civilization
H. Ross Murfin quotes from the Theory of Literature that psychological criticism allows us to explore the psychological “effects of literature upon its readers.” Joseph Conrad masterfully manipulates the colors within his novel to direct our emotional state as we read, while also confusing the audience by associating colors with unfamiliar motifs. Heart of Darkness examines the contrast between civil and savage through colors that are affiliated with juxtaposing ideas. White, the typical icon of purity and innocence, becomes arrogance and brutality, while black represents languish and despair. These converted symbols are paralleled with both the Europeans, who believe they are bringing order to the jungles of Africa, and the natives forced into labor for their white saviors. The lack of a clear divide between the imagery of oppression through black objectification and the radical severity associated with white imperialism is apparent through the actions and mentalities of both the suffering Africans and the repressive Europeans.
Conrad the Wordsmith: Joseph Conrad’s Incongruous Road Paved by Language
I. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness illustrates the paradoxical journey of Marlow, through contradictory images, which liaise the reader with Marlow’s nightmarish path into the abyss. Using his words as a palette, Conrad illustrates the path to the “Heart of Darkness” in a conflicting and even primitive manner to harmonize the reader with what goes on inside Marlow’s head. While on his journey, Marlow finds that in his world there are no more comforts in normality or in the commonness of everyday life. By confusing the reader with inconsistent phrases and contradictory images, Conrad is using his language to place the reader next to Marlow on the windy road to confusion, and portray Marlow’s ultimate discovery that the Westerners are the only ones that can be titled true savages.
Predictably Unpredictable: How Marlow’s Story is more reliable than it seems
J. Freud has defined the human mind as a dichotomous mixture of conscious and subconscious thought. This maxim of Freudian psychology proposes that a human behaves in a manner dictated by conscious thought; however, certain behaviors known as “Freudian slips” occur when one allows their persistent subconscious to elude repression. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in its plot and narration demonstrates this principal of Freudian psychology by outlining human behavior in a surrounding of lawlessness and darkness such as the African Congo. Marlow attempts to indoctrinate his audience with this theory of subconscious repression by sharing a firsthand account of his journey into the African Congo. At first glance Marlow’s wry humor, derisive or paradoxical language and fragmentation present him as an unreliable storyteller and discourage the reader from trusting his recollection. However, the apparent “incomprehension,” disorientation, and skewed storytelling reveal Marlow’s intended idea and convey more to the reader than the content of his narrations.
Go Toward the Light: How Marlow Leaves the Congo Before It Changes Him Forever
K. Joseph Conrad’s famous novella Heart of Darkness is an exploration into what happens to man as he enters an entirely different world, and how his preconceptions of that world and his own normal world are challenged. Heart of Darkness follows the riverboat captain Marlow as he attempts to make sense of the Congo, a place that he had dreamed about his whole life but which he found completely different to anything he had imagined. Marlow arrives in the Congo faced with two conflicting forces. One force is that of his own conscience demanding that he renounce the mission of the Belgians as evil. The other force is his near overwhelming desire to take on the personality of Kurtz, give into the Belgians, and become violent. Marlow resists the power of these two forces by denying to himself that the Belgians and Kurtz are evil, and by fleeing the Congo and Kurtz before he turns violent and uncivilized.
“Stylistic Confusion: How Conrad’s writing style enhances Marlow and the reader’s understanding of disorientation”
L. Set in the late 19th century, Joseph Conrad's novella, Heart of Darkness, depicts the moral, physical, and psychological struggles of a sailor, Marlow, and his travels up the Congo river. As the novel progresses Marlow's state of mind and distinction from wrong versus right become blurred, thus, creating a confusing atmosphere for the reader illuminated by Conrad's use of different stylistic forms of writing. As Conrad leads us further and deeper in to the 'heart of darkness', the style of unfinished thoughts, pauses, and disoriented language leads to not only exemplifying Marlow's confusion but that of the reader as well.
How you rank the essays and why:
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more reliable than he seems
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go toward the light: get out before you give in!
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confusing writing style
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Summarize what you respond to in an essay and why your top two ranked essays fulfilled your criteria.
Studente
English IV
Dr. Forman
1/25
The Colonization of Africa: Conrad vs. Marlow
In Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” the narrator, Marlow, tells a story about his experiences exploring Africa during its time of colonization. It would be easy to think that Conrad’s views of colonization are personified through Marlow as Conrad took a journey similar to Marlow’s before he wrote the novel. However, Conrad tries very hard to distinguish himself from Marlow in myriad ways. Conrad uses a frame narrator to bring the reader back to the original situation of Marlow just telling the story. Also, Conrad breaks the reader away from the “trance” that Marlow is experiencing to show that he does not agree with what Marlow is saying. Furthermore, through Marlow’s words the reader can tell that Conrad is actually rejecting Marlow’s views. In addition, psychoanalytic critic Fredrick Karl states that Conrad wishes to create distance between Marlow and himself because Marlow is meant to represent the average man, which the reader can identify with: “The sense of a first person narrative through the agency of Marlow, was necessary so that Conrad could gain aesthetic distance and the reader could identify with an average man thrown into an abnormal situation” (Karl 134). Conrad wishes to separate himself from Marlow because although Marlow represents opinions that Conrad believes the reader should relate to, Conrad’s intentions are clear through his mockery, cynical comments and out right ridicule of Marlow’s journey.
Works Cited
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. in Literature and Composition. ed: Jago, et al. Boston: Bedford, 2011. First published 1902.
Karl, Frederick R. “Introduction to the Danse Macabre: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” 1969. In Heart of Darkness: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism. Ed. Ross Murfin. NY: St. Martin’s Press. 1989.
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JJ
English IV
January 25th, 2010
Dr. Forman
Predictably Unpredictable: How Marlow’s Story is more reliable than it seems
Freud has defined the human mind as a dichotomous mixture of conscious and subconscious thought. This maxim of Freudian psychology proposes that a human behaves in a manner dictated by conscious thought; however, certain behaviors known as “Freudian slips” occur when one allows their persistent subconscious to elude repression. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in its plot and narration demonstrates this principal of Freudian psychology by outlining human behavior in a surrounding of lawlessness and darkness such as the African Congo. Marlow attempts to indoctrinate his audience with this theory of subconscious repression by sharing a firsthand account of his journey into the African Congo. At first glance Marlow’s wry humor, derisive or paradoxical language and fragmentation present him as an unreliable storyteller and discourage the reader from trusting his recollection. However, the apparent “incomprehension,” disorientation, and skewed storytelling reveal Marlow’s intended idea and convey more to the reader than the content of his narrations.
Marlow is unreliable in his telling of his journey through the heart of the African Congo. There is a blatant skew of morals, values, and simple historical fact. Instead of dismissing Marlow’s story due to shortcomings in his narration, readers are in fact instructed to interpret his methods of recollection as the meaning to his story. “Marlow was not typical…to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside.” (Conrad 3). Conrad tells the reader specifically, Marlow does not find the meaning of his story in the “inside like a kernel,” in this case meaning the plot and specifics. Marlow finds meaning in the outside of a story; to him, appearance, presentation, and perception are more important than portraying a story with perfect accuracy. “Much of what lies in the unconscious mind has been put there by consciousness…a censor…driving underground…thoughts…it deems unacceptable” (Murfin 114). Marlow is a perfect example of this Freudian theory which Murfin relays; he is telling a story by recalling his conscious stream of thought, all the while his unconscious is escaping repression through Freudian slips and bemusing language. One may go so far as to say that Marlow’s story, the truth about how the Congo can affect a man, lies in the way he tells his story, unreliably, rather than the facts of the story itself.
While the content of Marlow’s story in its own contradictory retelling serves to confuse the reader, Marlow’s disorganization and fogginess can provide explanation and insights onto the purpose of Marlow’s account. Throughout his story, Marlow uses paradoxical phrases and discrediting adjectives before words which should have much more meaning. Marlow refers to French battle in the Congo as “One of the wars,” (11). This demeaning language makes Marlow seem insensitive and unreliable as a story teller, however they reveal his true thoughts about the Congo. Marlow sees the futility and incomprehensibility of western presence in the Congo. Marlow also presents somewhat fragmented and non sequitur presentations of the events he heard of or witness in the Congo. He retells the story of the previous captain Fresleven’s death at the hands because of disputes over hens. He himself says the event was a “calamity” but finishes the story with a comical, nearly cynical remark: “What happened to the hens I don’t know either. I should thing the cause of progress got the, anyhow” (7). Marlow’s snide and diminutive remarks are off putting at first, but examining him as a “Freudian,” it is evident that Marlow is using the undercutting language as a self-defense mechanism, protecting him from the futility and frustration of the situation. Karl says: “the problem of Marlow [is]…to communicate the weight and depth of an experience which is uniquely felt.” (Karl 134). For Marlow to simply tell his audience the horrors of his experience would not be enough, instead he shows them in his apparent fragmentation and understatement of many events. Marlow tells the reader more about his journey into the Congo than lies in the simple retelling of fact with his roundabout narration; however, Marlow also reveals a dark side called out by the Jungle using the same mechanism of language.
Marlow’s language is very telling to the reader; while he “penetrated the jungle” (Karl 124), through his self-contradiction, Marlow shows that the jungle also penetrated him. He undermines the imperial efforts with undercutting adjectives: “a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech” (Conrad 11). Nevertheless, Marlow proceeds to contradict his disapproval of this “savage career” (westernizing the Congo), by revering Mr. Kurtz the most savage of all. In revering Mr. Kurtz, a man “compared with other forms of evil” (Karl 135), Marlow is succumbing to the temptation of “every man’s wish-fulfillment” (Karl 125). Marlow states, speaking about Kurtz: “I respected the fellow. Yes; I respected his collars, his vast cuffs, his brushed hair.” (Conrad 15) Marlow shows disrespect to the colonizing and westernizing forces ‘invading’ the natives of the Congo. As Conrad shows, and Karl and Murfin both argue, Marlow has a seemingly romanticized view of Kurtz and “obsesses” over him. He appreciates Kurtz’s strength, appearance and poise in a situation which even he labeled as futile and miserable with his descriptions. Marlow disagrees with what is happening in the Congo, the displacement, Christianization, and indenturing of the natives. Still, the jungle appeals to part of his subconscious which Freud discusses in his theses. The dark Congo has brought out an appreciation for the savageness of Kurtz which western civilization would shun. There is a clear contradiction in Marlow’s opinions of his duties in the Congo and his view of Kurtz. This contradiction creates an ambiguity for Marlow’s audience; one doesn’t know whether his tale is coming from the conscious or unconscious. It is this confusion however, that is more telling about an experience up the African Congo, not the contradictory language itself.
Marlow’s story telling ability is questionable. He constantly contradicts himself, breaks off from his narration, confuses timing and forgets certain details. Nevertheless, his story is found more in the way it is told than the content. Marlow’s “moral sensibility” allows the reader to take him seriously, and justify his words with psychological exploration. (Karl 126). While he shows signs of weakness, allowing his repressed subconscious to come out with his reverence of Kurtz, he shows ethical stability in his diminishing of progress which the west is supposed to bring with its presence in the Congo. If Marlow’s story is taken and observed to be revealing of the Congo through psychoanalysis, than despite his unreliable storytelling, Marlow’s story is in fact a very reliable source.
Works Cited
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. in Literature and Composition. ed: Jago, et al. Boston: Bedford, 2011. First published 1902.
Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and its Discontents. London: Penguin, 2002. First published 1930.
Freud, Sigmund. Interpretation of Dreams. trans: AA Brill. NY: Macmillian, 1913. First published 1899.
Karl, Frederick R. “Introduction to the Danse Macabre: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” 1969. In Heart of Darkness: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism. Ed. Ross Murfin. NY: St. Martin’s Press. 1989.
Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and its Discontents. London: Penguin, 2002. First published 1930.
Freud, Sigmund. Interpretation of Dreams. trans: AA Brill. NY: Macmillian, 1913. First published 1899.
Karl, Frederick R. “Introduction to the Danse Macabre: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” 1969. In Heart of Darkness: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism. Ed. Ross Murfin. NY: St. Martin’s Press. 1989.
Murfin, Ross C. Heart of Darkness: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism. NY: St. Martin’s Press. 1989.
