Resumo de Heart Of Darkness

HEART OF DARKNESS

Heart of Darkness is one of Conrad?s most ambiguous stories and the author had a foreknowledge of its ambiguity, as he makes clear in a letter written to Cunninghame Graham: ?There are two more installments in which the idea is so wrapped up in secondary notions that you ? even you ? may miss it.? In keeping with the ambiguity that the story presents, the title lends itself to various interpretations: a journey into the heart of the dark continent, Africa, a voyage into the darkness of the sub-conscious mind as well as a journey into the unknown.

The story of Heart of Darkness is told by Marlow who once had the job of taking a steam-boat up the Congo to bring back from a distant trading-post an ivory-trader named Kurtz. This voyage takes the narrator to the heart of Africa. Africa, Europe?s anti-type, is a place at once horrific and vital, evolving complex responses in the European. Its landscape is hostile and un-Wordsworthian, with dense vegetation ?like a rioting invasion of soundless life, a rolling wave of plants ??. ready to ??. sweep every little man of us out of his little existence.? Marlow refers to the great silence of the impenetrable forests where the air was warm, thick, heavy and sluggish. The long stretches of the water-way ran on into the gloom of overshadowed and the broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands.

The barbarism of the natives reinforces the effect of the descriptive passages and intensifies the atmosphere of mystery and fear that underlies much of the narration. The natives attack Marlow?s steamer in all their ignorance, in all their darkness of mind, for they were obeying Kurtz?s order. Kurtz has begun to identify himself with the savages, participating in their customs and ceremonies and presiding over their midnight dances which always end with ?unspeakable rites?. He has been experiencing ?abominable satisfactions? and has become a part of the darkness of the dark continent. His utterance, ?The horror! The horror!? just before his death, is not a renunciation of evil as the narrator believes, but an exultant rejection of the obsolete values of a dying civilization. Thus, the novella may be regarded as an implicit attack on the values of western society, as K.K. Ruthven suggests, and ?an annunciation of the Savage God?.

Pulsating with ?hidden evil?, the jungle is also a present reminder of our own prehistory for, sailing up the Congo is like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world? with the result that Marlow and his crew feel like ?wanderers on prehistoric earth?. This Frazerian-anthropological element is developed in a manner that curiously anticipates Jung when Conrad treats the experience as an act of penetration to the most ancient core of the European mind, a stirring of racial memories: hearing the incomprehensive yells of the savages Marlow remarks that ?if you were man enough you would admit to yourself ?? a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you ? you so remote from the night of first ages ? could comprehend.?

The journey up the Congo is a psychic voyage into the innermost recesses of the mind, to a point at which European morality has not even begun to operate. Marlow is solidly and naively Victorian in his moral outlook and feels that in order to endure stark realities of human life, a man should possess strength ofcharacter. There are passages scattered throughout Marlow?s narration that give readers glimpses of his own mind. He reveals the effect on his own psyche of Kurtz?s arguments defending his action in slipping away from the ship?s cabin into the jungle.

Heart of Darkness is a travelogue, but the revelations of travel are never simply geographical. For critics like F.R. Leavis and E.M. Foster the darkness of Africa remains inconceivable. The ?darkness? of the novel lends itself to different interpretations: it is the unknown; it is the subconscious; it is a moral darkness; it is the evil which swallows Kurtz and it is the spiritual emptiness which he sees at the centre of existence; but above all it is the mystery itself, the mysteriousness of man?s spiritual life. The phrase ?heart of darkness? compels attention but resists analysis, as symbols should, and in this way Conrad is able to penetrate our bias against the primitive, enabling us to experience the African darkness without feeling that we are simply reverting to barbarism.

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