Lesser Of Two Evils In Joseph Conrad's Heart Of Darkness

Lesser of Two Evils

Zachary Peterson

Zsp140030

HUMA 1301-006

April 28, 2015

Joseph Conrad was a fiction novelist who became one of the most well know novelists of his day. One of the pieces he was responsible for was a book called Heart of Darkness. This book was written about a group that was in search of a man named Kurtz down the Congo River. In the writing of this book, Conrad did a very good job of keeping his readers interested because anything could have happened. Conrad used many symbols and made the characters do certain things that kept the readers guessing. Conrad used things like fog, and changing the way that characters are acting, which made the journey in the book more ominous and less obvious. Joseph Conrad’s

Joseph Conrad uses all these things to show that not only in real life, but also with the characters, there is a struggle between good and evil, how easily one’s identity can be changed, and how people abuse and do not want to give up their power. When writing this book, Conrad used multiple different symbols to describe all that was happening while Marlow was on the search for Kurtz. One of the most obvious symbols that Conrad used in this book was the fog. Marlow and the others on the ship encountered this extremely dense fog on their travels up the river. The fog was so dense that they couldn’t see what was coming ahead of them and they didn’t know where they were going. It was said that, “When the sun rose there was a white fog, very warm and clammy, and more blinding than the night. It did not shift or drive; it was just there, standing all around you like something solid.” (Heart of Darkness, Page 35) These people searching for Kurtz were going up the river blind. The evil to become blurred. As Marlow was headed up the river to reach Kurtz, many bad things were happening all around him. People were dying, natives were attacking, and people’s heads were put on posts around Kurtz’s compound. Marlow was pushed into a place where there was no good around. When he was faced with a decision, there was no good option, just two evil options. When in the presence of Kurtz, Marlow thought, “It seemed to me I had never breathed an atmosphere so vile, and I turned mentally to Kurtz for relief - positively for relief.” (Heart of Darkness, Page 57). This showed how truly horrible the area was. Marlow turned to this warlord for relief. This place was so blatantly malicious that there were no good things to choose from, only evil and less evil. Conrad did this because there are things like this in real life. Sometimes one might have to make a hard decision where it can badly affect all that are involved or