Throughout his narrative in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Charlie Marlow characterizes events, ideas, and locations that he encounters in terms of light or darkness. Embedded in Marlow's parlance is an ongoing metaphor equating light with knowledge and civility and darkness with mystery and savagery. When he begins his narrative, Marlow equates light and, therefore, civility, with reality, believing it to be a tangible expression of man's natural state. Similarly, Marlow uses darkness to depict savagery as a vice having absconded with nature. But as he proceeds deeper into the heart of the African jungle and begins to understand savagery as a primitive form of civilization and, therefore, a reflection on his own reality, the metaphor shifts, until the narrator raises his head at the end of the novel to discover that the Thames seemed to 'lead into the heart of an immense darkness.'' The alteration of the light-dark metaphor corresponds with Marlow's cognizance that the only 'reality', 'truth', or 'light' about civilization is that it is, regardless of appearances, unreal, absurd, and shrouded in 'darkness'.
Marlow uses the contrast between darkness and light to underscore the schism between the seemingly disparate realms of civility and savagery, repeatedly associating light with knowledge and truth; darkness with mystery and deceptive evil. When Marlow realizes that his aunt's acquaintances had misrepresented him to the Chief of the Inner Station, Marlow states, 'Light dawned upon me', as if to explicitly associate light with knowledge or cognizance. It is significant then, that Marlow later associates light with civilization. He describes the knights-errant who went out from the Thames to conquer...
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Available: http://www.lawrence.edu/~johnson/heart.
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness, New York: Dover, 1990.
Hayes, Dorsha. "Heart of Darkness: An Aspect of the Shadow," Spring (1956): 43-47..
Levenson, Michael. "The Value of Facts in the Heart of Darkness." Nineteenth-Century Fiction 40 (1985):351-80.
McLynn, Frank. Hearts of Darkness: The European Exploration of Africa. New York: Carol & Gey, 1992.
Mellard, James. "Myth and Archetype in Heart of Darkness," Tennessee Studies in Literature 13 (1968): 1-15.
Rosmarin, Adena. "Darkening the Reader: Reader Response Criticism and Heart of Darkness." Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism. Ed. Ross C. Murfin. New York: St. Martin's, 1989.
Watt, Ian. Conrad in the Nineteenth Century. San Diego: U. of California P, 1979. 168-200, 249-53.
To summarize the Fourth Amendment, it protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures. A search conducted by the government exists when the area or person being searched would reasonably have an expectation of privacy. A seizure takes place when the government takes a person or property into custody based on belief a criminal law was violated. If a search or seizure is deemed unreasonable, than any evidence obtained during that search and seizure can be omitted from court under
Schein, Seth L. The Mortal Heroes: An Introduction to Homer's Iliad. Berkley: U. of California P, 1984.
Heart of Darkness is a kind of little world unto itself. The reader of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness should take the time to consider this work from a psychological point of view. There are, after all, an awful lot of heads and skulls in the book, and Conrad goes out of his way to suggest that in some sense Marlow's journey is like a dream or a return to our primitive past--an exploration of the dark recesses of the human mind.
Schein, Seth L. The Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer's Iliad. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
As police officers continue their hunt to remove criminals off the street, search and seizure has been an ongoing pursuit. The Fourth Amendment protects our right against an unreasonable search. Just like citizens, police officers have limit caps on what they can and cannot do. Although they try to get away with coercion, our Fourth Amendment plays a crucial role in determining arbitrary and lawful search and seizures. Search and seizure has played an important role in law enforcement over the years and it still continues to shape our criminal justice system.
The Fourth Amendment is the basis on which defendants of privacy base their arguments in legal battles. It guarantees that citizens will never be subject to “unreasonable searches and seizures”. The key word is unreasonable; that is, indiscriminate snooping on another person's personal information. Many court cases have hinged their decisions on interpretations of the Fourth Amendment.
The setting of the story is surprising. It is a little tavern on a Caribbean island. The Little Heidleberg is a place full of improvisations and the unexpected. In this tropical area resides a place with walls decorated with “bucolic scenes of country life in the Alps…” (Allende, 174). Mango and guava are used in strudel due to the absence of apples. The musicians are clad in “lederhosen, woolen knee socks, Tyrolean suspenders, and fel...
Schein, Seth L. The Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer's Iliad. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
Without personal access to authors, readers are left to themselves to interpret literature. This can become challenging with more difficult texts, such as Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness. Fortunately, literary audiences are not abandoned to flounder in pieces such as this; active readers may look through many different lenses to see possible meanings in a work. For example, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness may be deciphered with a post-colonial, feminist, or archetypal mindset, or analyzed with Freudian psycho-analytic theory. The latter two would effectively reveal the greater roles of Kurtz and Marlow as the id and the ego, respectively, and offer the opportunity to draw a conclusion about the work as a whole.
Homer. ?The Odyssey,? World Masterpieces: Expanded Edition. Maynard Mack ed. Ed. Coptic St.: Prentice, 1995.
Clarke, Howard. Homer's Readers: A Historical Introduction to the Iliad and the Odyssey. Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1981.
“The sky, without a speck, was a benign immensity of unstained light” (Conrad 2). By using wording such as “benign” and “unstained”, it paints a picture in one’s mind of a kindly, pure environment. Since the story begins here, it seems as though the tale has begun in the light, and accordingly, honesty, and as the day progresses will descend into darkness and thus falsehood. As Marlow begins to speak, he contemplates the history of the land around him. “Light came out of this river since-you say knights? Yes; but it is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker-may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday” (Conrad 3). He speaks of our world as a “flicker”, a twinkle in the “darkness” that was present before our civilization arose. T...
* Conrad, Joseph. “Heart of Darkness” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, M.H. Abrams, general editor. (London: W.W. Norton, 1962, 2000)
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness 3rd Ed. Ed. Robert Kimbrough. New York: Norton Critical, 1988.
While Heart of Darkness offers a powerful view into the hypocrisy of imperialism, it also delves into the morality of men. Darkness becomes a symbol of hatred, fear and symbol of the power of evil. Marlow begins his story believing that these elements exists within the jungle, then with the natives and finally makes the realization that darkness lives within the heart of each man, even himself. People must learn to restrain themselves from giving into the "darkness." Marlow discusses at one point how even suffering from starvation can lead a man to have "black" thoughts and restraining oneself from these thoughts would be almost impossible in such hardship.