The Heart of Darkness

I’m going to be completely honest and say that I was not looking forward to reading The Heart of Darkness. At all. But when I finally sat down and started reading, it wasn't so bad--even if it gave me the most trouble out of the three books. I did not understand what was going on in the first few pages—I’ll admit, I may have been a bit distracted, but eventually, I caught on to the fact that Marlow was telling a story to Conrad. A narrator within a narrator? Clever-- but kind of confusing. After I figured that out, the book started looking up, and my understanding for it increased as well.

To start off, I liked that Marlow was relatively open-minded. He seemed to be knowledgeable about the world, and I guess that makes sense seeing as though he is a sailor. Though it was horrible that he had to witness the brutality in the Congo, it was necessary to make him the person he is. By him being open-minded, he had more of an impact on the book itself, and it made him a more reliable character. I hate seeing the cruelty in men; not only because it makes me sick to my stomach, but because it isn’t completely fiction. There has been and still is cruelty in mankind. When Marlow first meets the natives, I could imagine the sadness within their hearts; I could just picture them tied to each other by the neck with a look of hopelessness that their life would ever be good and fair again. The idea of this majestic island contrasting with the brutality of man was an effective way of writing made by Joseph Conrad. It gave the feel of the island being suitable for the white man, but it was a complete opposite experience for the natives. The imagery I obtained from these contrasting ideas made me think of the book as more realistic, and by doing so, it had more of an impact on me. Kurtz was someone whom I pictured really well. I give him credit for being as clever as he was. He was a great leader; he was a very talented person in general. And I didn’t imagine the famous line, “The horror! The horror!” to come out of his mouth. I feel pretty cool knowing what that line is from now. :)

For this book, I annotated it by looking more at Joseph Conrad’s style. His writing was very elegant and the transitions flowed fairly nicely. Like I mentioned before, his use of contrasting ideas made the book that much more interesting to read. It wasn’t an easy read by any means, but I feel that by focusing on Joseph Conrad’s writing style, it made me get a better understanding if the book. I couldn’t help but compare his writing style to that of Hosseini. I liked Hosseini’s writing style a lot more, but I noticed that both writers were big in the foreshadowing department; also, both Conrad and Hosseini used contrasting ideas in their writing. Conrad used it for the big and majestic island compared to the evil within man, and Hosseini used this writing style to compare Hassan with Amir--it was pretty cool to see the similarities. :)