The Relevance of Heart of Darkness Essay

This paper introduces an adventure novel “Heart of Darkness” written by English writer Joseph Conrad and published in 1902. It presents and discusses the novel “Heart of Darkness”, its main characteristics, and proves a thesis that Heart of Darkness is still relevant until today and requires a lot of attention from the community because its ideas and themes are useful and instructive for people in spite of any person’s age.
To start with, Conrad’s supreme achievement is the novel “Heart of Darkness.” The story is on behalf of the protagonist, a sailor Marlow, who remembers his journey to Central Africa. Tucker emphasized that “Marlow tells us the story of his journey in one long flashback, and soon we see why he is such a carking mope” (par. 4).
On the instructions of the “Company” (it is about the Congo Free State), he should arrive at a remote station and pick up one of the agents of the company by the name of Kurtz who is engaged in collecting ivory. The main part of the book is Marlow’s narration about his trip to a tropical river that is a completely unknown territory for many Europeans. His story is full of real, but at the same time, very horrific details about Aboriginal peoples and their lives, and about orders and customs, which are implanted in the distant colonies.
Examining “Heart of Darkness”, it is possible to mention that this is a fundamentally new feature of literature of the twentieth century – an unprecedented degree of concentration problems and pluralism, the ambiguity of their ideological and artistic decisions.
A variety of scenes of death, violence, disease, black savagery are a prologue to a trip to the inner station, where Marlow is curious about the new lands, hearing about the most extraordinary man of the colony. The problem of evil and its nature and origins had a special interest in the literature of the twentieth century. If the literature of the XIX century interpreted the word “evil” as an integral part of life, which must be recognized, and thereby exposed, Conrad’s evil, darkness and gloom are leitmotifs of the novel: the word “evil” is incomprehensible and unavoidable. Conrad’s evil is concentrated in the novel “Heart of Darkness.” The meaning of the title story is gradually revealed as a comprehension of the heart of black Africa as a comprehension of evil in human nature. The unambiguous answer to the question of what evil is and where its origins, the author does not give in this novel.
In addition to the above-mentioned information, it should be added that there are social motives in this story, exposures of predatory exploitation of the colonies.
Furthermore, there are anti-racist motives: evil is existed in nature: African nature is hostile and disastrous to Europeans, but the main evil, perhaps, lies in the human soul. In Conrad’s novel, evil tries to show itself in a good light. Marlow realizes that his loyalty to humanity goes against his experience, which gives a hint that there is no truth or justice in our world, there is only idealism, selfishness, greed and fanaticism. Thus, pessimism, which is characteristic for modernism, appears in such a concept of peace and human.
The adventure novel acquires a philosophical sense. The same complication occurs in the art of Conrad’s narration. The ambiguity, which is implicated in the author’s position, gives a good opportunity to different interpretations of the story. Some critics see it as one of the best exposures of imperialism, its hypocrisy and cruelty. “The plot of Heart of Darkness is in part a political autopsy of imperialist myths” (Stewart 319).
Observing the relevance of “Heart of Darkness,” it is necessary to say that Conrad’s world is truly tragic because it is full of terrible secrets. The stylistic device that is called silence (the limitation of language), skipping the most important things, is very important to Conrad and the poetics of modernism. The plot, content, and style of the novel are inseparably fused to achieve a single, common effect, which includes diversity, ambiguity, and exquisite complexity of the work. Moreover, this work is a sarcastic criticism of colonialism. Heart of Darkness introduces an excellent expression of reality than other analogous works.
Talking about the relevance of the novel, it is possible to add that a lot of students of literature and of course history read and discuss Conrad’s novel because “…the story is one of fiction’s strongest statements about imperialism. Of course, the novel has other important themes, both psychological and metaphysical. But the theme of imperialism is obvious and central” (Hawkins 286).
Taking the above-mentioned information into consideration, it is possible to draw a conclusion that the novel “Heart of Darkness” is really a masterpiece of English literature. This is a proven fact that Joseph Conrad made a great contribution to the development of world literature as a whole. Thus, Heart of Darkness has no age limits and is relevant in our time since it contains diversity and inconsistency of human existence.