Heart of Darkness is a novella and a frame story written in first person. It's very interesting in that though it's in first person, most of the story is heard from the voice of a Charlie Marlow who our narrator is listening to. The contribution of the narrator is minimal, as is the present time of the book as most of it takes place in the past. The whole story is just whacked, distanced, unreliable because of it and realistic because of that, and so, overall down-right frightening. I recall calling The Secret Sharer unbelievably unrelaible because the Captain was crazy-ish. Well, I don't know about the narrator here, but Marlow, man does he need help. This guy is crazy and you watch him get crazy. This will be fun. Honest.
The story: Unnamed narrator is on a boat with five other guys on the Thames near London. One of the guys, Charlie Marlow, starts talking about how he got a job on a boat in Africa a while back and went to Congo. In Congo, a bunch of stuff happens, mostly revolving around how terribly the whites treat the natives, how strange things are and grotesque and eerie, and how eveypne seems to be in such reverence for this man Kurtz. Marlow then meets Kurtz after a bunch of difficulties and finds that Kurtz is just as remarkable and a genius as everyone had said, but Kurtz is now very sick and also tainted with a want for fame and fortune. Marlow is there when Kurtz dies and hears Kurtzs last words "The horror. The horror!" and then goes back to England. A year later he meets Kurtz's fiancee, tells her that the last words were her name and finally we end with the five guys and narratror looking towards where the river leads, looking into the heart of darkness that is actually Western culture or more specifically, London.
The characters are the most important aspect of a book. Gosh I've said that so many times, by now you have to believe me. The charcaters are the most important aspect of a book. Here we have marlow and we have Kurtz and then we have England and Congo as wholes really, unless we want to split the natives and the whites. Well, we have Marlow. Let's talk writing style.
So the style starts out amazingly beautiful and long-winded by the narrator and then just gets confusing a bit but simplistic enough with Marlow speaking. As the story goes on, the writing gets more and more philisophical, dense, personal, opininated, and since Marlow's opinions turn out to be more and more dark, the writing turns more and more creepy, especially since it is told in a rather matter-of-fact tone. By this time, gosh, you have to have a pretty good vocabulary. I write the words I don't know on my arm to look up later, usually, but for this book, it was impossible. My arm was covered. Well, the sophistication gets insane, but the style to is what really messes you up. You really have to read it to understand. He sort of jumps from one idea to the next very abruptly, and also jumps perspectives too, narrating the words of others, often lacking quotation marks, and the paragraphs get really long too. And you go out of the action into the mind,, going on the long streams of thought that Marlow has, and then his comments on these thoughts, a bit of action that you don't even notice because of all the surrounding thought and dream, and then you emerge out of the fog of speculation and you fid yourself without a clue as to what people are talking about, you go back and read that whole thought tornado again, find the action, go "Oh..." and then go back a couple other pages, go "Oh...huh?....Oh..." again ad then finally move on to repeat again. That's the book. That's just Marlow too. Actually more than understanding absolutely everything that happens, more important is the effect of all this. As things grow more confusing, it's as though Marlow has commandeered one part of your brain to use as a practical example in showing you just how he lost his mind and as he is conducting this experiment, he loses grip on this sanity he has grown back, and insane the experiment grows into quite the epidemic and you just go crazy reading it. That's Marlow talking and it's very effective and it's unconscious. But then there's Conrad doing his bit too as the narrator. He does all this stuff with time, jumping in and out of past and present and past and present within Marlow too. There's just so much eeriness going around and so many brain bombs. The style says it all.
Now that I comunicated that, I just don't know what to say. The thing with this book is that it's so rich that you just get lost as to what to think afterward. I bet if someone straight-up asked me a question about it, like told me to write an essay on...somethng, I would do it, and well too, but now just free and wandering, it's just, well, the book is amazing. All you want to say is quotations. They're long though...
Wow, well, let me latch on to something. Umm.. alright got it. So Marlow hears a whole lot about Kurtz before actually meeting him. That's interesting. He gets this pre-created idea of Kurtz and these prejudices before actually seeing him and then when he meets him, it's a bit confusing. He hears a lot of praise of him, that he's a genius, a Renaissance man, that he can paint, write, later on that he's a musician too, and that he's a mastermind at hunting down ivory. He's hypnotic too. He has a voice that can convince you of anything and just demand conformity from you. All this he hears and there's also the way he hears it too. He hears it from these creepy natives that are zombie-like in that they are a bit vague in thought about him, and being abused too, you get the whole idea of them being broken into by Kurtz. There's just such a mystery surrounding Kurtz, further intensifies, of course by that nobody's ever actually seen Kurtz. I mean, he's a phantom. So all that is very interesting, but personally, if I had spent three months surroundedby sinister beings and heard this, I think I'd be a bit too scared to meet kurtz and instead of revering him, I'd fear him. Marlow though feels inspired, I suppose. He imagines Kurtz as a voice more than anything else and wishes to speak to him more than anything else. So yeah, voices, creepy. I guess this idea is the one most well-shown in Apocalypse Now, which is worth watching by the way. There's this part in the movie where you see Brando as Kurtz for the first time after hearing about him for so long, (and in the movie, Willard, the movie version of Marlow, actually hears Kurtz's voice over a cassette first) and you see him for a full maybe three minutes befor you actually see his face. I mean you see this gold light on his creepy bald head and meaty ears and neck and hands and everything, hearing his voice rumbling, shivers, but you do not see the face for ever. It's maddening. You actually feel like you're going insane waiting for it. And then you see it, and the face, I mean, Marlon Brando doesn't exactly have the most unthreatening face, but in the end, the face is human but soehow itlooks like a monster. The book does the same thing but even better. The voice, the voice, Marlow obsessing and revering for no reason, the voice, the want to meet him, all the way through, the river, gettiing closer, the steerer dying, the eeriness, the stakes with heads, the natives, the grotesque atmosphere all around and then the voice again, obsessively and finally, finally you meet Kurtz and it just happens so abruptly. He just appears really suddenly and he's absolutley insignificant. he's frail, sickly and immediately Marlow is astounded.
You know, this may be one of the worst blogs I've written. You know, that's probably just because I'm trying to describe a dream. That's what this book is, a very well-written dream, and well-written because when it is over, all you have with you, all you have left is an impression of what happened. You could read analyses of this book. You could read a whole bunch of them because there is literally no limit to things that people can say about it, but in the end, while analyses can be infinitely helpful for many books that mean to articulate a message or show a beautiful plot or person, this one is different. This is my first reading, mind, and that means I'm still absolutely an idiot when it comes to this book. Still, though my argument stands. What you analyse when reading a book is what the author does to create the book, and that is like pulling apart a flower to see how it's created. The beauty of a flower can very well be the individual cells and sinews and fibers, but the visible, simplistic wonder of it is the bloom. The author's work is a trick. I person may not understand why he feels sorrow but he feels it anyway, and later on, he may not understand that this sympathy he feels now is felt because of the previous sadness and the similarities in diction at these two momements combined with some strength in irony and some continuity through motif, but he still feels sympathy, and he still feels the message derived from this sympathy and he feels it all just as true despite not knowing. Only biologists like cells like they do, I mean, I hate cells, but I love flowers. So don't judge me for loving semicolons but don't judge me for not knowing yet how Conrad used them. I only love Heart of Darkness, and I will love it even more in the times to come, but you could never read an analysis and love it just as much as if you did. The thing is to love books. You either love or you don't. There's no grey area, and if you love them, well, then whatever, you'll be fine forever.
This is what Heart of Darkness is: a dream that you listen to and you don't think about because you can't, a dream that you think is wonderful and terrible, and you hear "The horror, the horror!" and think, wow, Kurtz, you summed it up, very impressive. I can't articulate as well as Kurtz can, in a word, but well, Kurtz is a genius. I do know that Marlow has done what Kurtz has: spoken and changed lives and minds. So Marlow is most definitely now Kurtz. And the guys now, are they Kurtz too? Is it infectious. I do believe so. Narrator can see the darkness in the river to come. They say darkness so many times, it's terribly unrepetitive. Gosh, you just don't know what to say. I'll just let you read it. Sorry about the previous preaching but I just can't be bothered to edit. This is just for fun, remember. Here's one of the best paragraphs evr written. It's super long so that will be it.
Read folks, Read.
"However, as you see, I did not join Kurtz there and then. I did not. I remained to ream the nightmare out to the end, and to show my loyalty to Kurtz once more. Destiny. My destiny! Droll thing life is - that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself - that comes too late - a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, ithout the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be. I was within a hair's breadth of the last oppurtunity for pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that I probably would have nothing to say. This is the reason why I affirm that Kurtz was a remarkable man. He had something to say. He said it. Since I had peeped over the edge myself, I understand better the meaning of his stare, that could not see the flame of the candle, but enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness. He had summed up - he had judged. 'The horror!' He was a remarkable man. After all, this was the expression of some sort of belief; it had candour, it had conviction, it had a vibrating note of revolt in its whisper, it had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth - the strange commingling of desire and hate. And it is not my own extremity I remember best - a vision of greyness without form filled with physical pain, and a careless contempt for the evanescence of all things - even of this pain itself. No! It is his extremity that I seem to have lived through. True, he had made that last stride, he had stepped over the edge, while I had been permitted to draw back my hesitating foot. And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all insincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time inn which we step over the threshold of the invisible. Perhaps! I like to think my summing-up would not have been a word of careless contempt. Better his cry - much better. Itw was an affirmation - a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions. But it was a victory! That is why I have remained loyal to Kurtz to the last, and even beoynd, when a long time after I heard once more, not hisown voice, but the echo of his magnificent eloquence thrown to me from a soul as transluscently pure a cliff of crystal."
