reading points

Well, I think the reading points suck, but only because of their obviousness, so here goes. The whole novel presents itself as a monolith to human duality, but that in and of itself is kind of obvious. The natives appear as simple cannibalistic barbarians while the whites appear to be imperialistic marauders, swarming across the country and sucking up all the resources they can with the labor that's available at the cheapest price, their morality. Still in some ways the book almost seems to be a testament the old bible testament too much knowledge can be a bad thing, such as with the story of Adam and Eve.

While the novella as a whole can be seen as a simple difference between good and evil, the difference between ignorance and knowledge comes into play here. The Africans aren't necessarily good so much as stupid, they don't really understand the hatred and the fear that drive the whites so they don't feel the same. Whereas the whites are much more knowledgeable and complete nightmares as a result. They don't understand the natives anymore than the natives understand them, but they do understand that there is profit to be made, and a people too stupid to know to use it so all they see is an opportunity to dominate.

This is further reinforced by Marlow's desire to reach Kurtz. He sees Kurtz as someone with all the answers, with all the knowledge, since he is somehow able to stay here in this jungle. The more Marlow sees of the travesty that is Africa at this point the more he wants to know why this all happened. He's seeking an answer, but in the end all Marlow is shown is "the horror, the horror" of the African country.

darkness and light

I cannot tell you guys how much being the first one to answer these questions is freaking me out. Well anyway, as to the differences between darkness and light I believe we've come to an interesting reversal. Typically the hero uses light, white, or bright (heehee) things to symbolize his purity, chastity and overall wonderfulness, i.e. white horses, white light, white armor or white whatever-happens-to-be-there-at-the-time. Obviously in The Heart of DARKNESS this is not the case. For the most part black seems to symbolize pure, innocent, almost childlike, whereas the white is used as an almost disdainful adjective for the word around.

The part that particularly comes to mind is the chapter we have discussed in class, where the accountant shows up in his perfect white suit after Marlow has just seen an almost apocalyptic seen of human suffering and torment. The stark difference in the characters at this point in the novella is drastic. The accountant hates the savages of the Congo, he wants nothing to do with them, doesn't want to touch or see or speak with them because they are beneath him and beneath his notice. In my opinion black represents dirt, earth, life in this novella. These are all things that the liberating white men despise.

I say dirt, because this reminds me of a part in The Fountainhead (bite me TeNeal), where the main character gets in trouble for a church he has made(he is an architect). The church appears to everyone to be grovelling in the dirt,to be a part of the rock and earth from which it is made,to them it appears to be grovelling, because they are afraid to see that's it's reveling. This is the same situation. The black or dark "savages" are not cowering or rolling in the dirt, they are living in it. They are not worse or better than the whites, they are simply different. Instead of shackling the earth and everything else they cannot control, they embrace it, they laugh and dance and sing even when their brothers and sisters are being taken because it never really occurs to them to wage a war. Oh sure they fight, but (at least in this novella) only when they are commanded to by a white man, to wage a war, to shift your whole society into a pit of fear and despair as you fight, this never occurs to them, to stop living never occurs to them.

Unfortunatly this is just the tip of the iceberg, simply the difference found in skin color and clothing, but I believe that this is what colors the whole book's symbolism, black is life, and white is death.

topic 1 (boring)

well since no one else has started I guess I will. First of all let me say I hate this topic the most out of all of them so forgive me if my response blows. As to the question, what are the possible effects of layered narration, the first answer is obvious, because it gives a feeling of reality to the story. While Heart of Darkness is based on reality, the descriptions of human suffering and agony seem almost impossible to the average human being, to someone who has not actually been there. This is the reason for the narration leveling, at least the most obvious one.

The second one is, strangely enough, for character building in my opinion. The character Kurtz is shown as a force, a voice, more presence than man, so what would such a man think about? How would he think to begin with? Kurtz is both a character that defies description and a character that is described frequently using a veritable plethora of adjectives none of which seem to match. So while you learn a great deal about Kurtz, you don't really come to understand him, which is what narrating from a personal perspective is all about.

So my question to you is simply what you think, am I wrong? Please tell me your opinion because if no one argues with me this will get very boring very quickly, tell us what you think in regards to this topic so we can tangent off into another one as quickly as possible.

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