The Conundrum Of Life In Joseph Conrad's Heart Of Darkness

It seems that from the very beginning of the conundrum of life rules are ingrained into human mental system. Humans beings are taught by their parents to listen, their teachers to raise their hands, and their governments to maintain order. Human beings have an innate need for structure and order within their lives, which is something that vanishes with the increase of age. To fill the void of structureless societies and to find the truth about themselves; humans look to omniscient deities.

Throughout Chapter II of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Marlow goes on a long voyage to gain the guidance of the all-knowing, enlightened ivory trader named Kurtz. Marlow, in the tumultuous environment of the African jungle, challenges the human condition.

Why not? Anything-- anything can be done in this country”(10). The men have no regard for the African Congo. The men see this place as a primitive society that for any of their wrongdoings bear no consequences. Marlow sees this and wants more than just hollow men whom he describes as “less valuable animals” (11). This is when Marlow starts to become obsessed with finding the powerful ivory trader Kurtz—the only man with morals—to be his own voice of reason and to show him guidance. Marlow wants to know more about Kurtz, more than just him being “that man” (9) and decides to travel to reveal Kurtz’s ambiguous identity. Marlow takes the perilous voyage through the jungle, a place that reminded him of “traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world” (11). Marlow and the crew of his steamer “crawl like a sluggish beetle crawling on the floor of a lofty portico… toward Kurtz” (12). As Marlow travels he observes and comments on the untamed nature of the surrounding landscape. The area is a place where “vegetation rioted” (11).Although the English thought of it as a conquered area, it was still wild similar to the inhabitants. As Marlow studies the “ savage” inhabitants of the wilderness,

He misses his helmsman because unlike the other whites he worked hard. The helmsman was a sailor and Marlow starts to realize that sailors have an unexplainable brotherhood. With the helmsman 's death, Marlow wonders if Kurtz too might be dead. The thought disturbs Marlow, who realizes that he has been longing to speak with Kurtz. More specifically, he has been longing to "hear" what Kurtz has to say. He recounts his obsession and lust to hear Kurtz as “Absurd!”. Marlow after Kurtz’s death starts to feel no sense of purpose in life anymore. He feels that “..he had been robbed of a belief or had missed a destiny in life”(23) which shows that Kurtz held so much value to Marlow that now in his absence he has essentially lost his belief or “faith”. This is a direct parallel to the lost of “faith” that Goodman Brown experiences when he loses whose wife named Faith and after her death loses his faith in the Christian religion and mankind. Marlow, upon discovery of the book starts to see that within the midst of the African jungle lies a bit of the civilized world. The discovery of the book was “unreal” (14) and Marlow’s inability to recount “some such name”(14), the