Darkness Human Condition

In the story of "Heart of Darkness", there are many examples of human conditions and the depths that they will have when they crave their own desires. The name "Heart of Darkness" in itself means an unknown sense of evil and leads to secrecy and mystery. Marlowe encountered - the darkness of the Congolese wilderness, the cruel treatment of the indigenous peoples in Europe, and the evil in the darkness of everyone's internal unfathomable. Marlowe's story was used to represent the world's civilized and uncivilized side. Conrad used light to represent the human civilization while contrasting darkness with uncivilized and barbaric people. Everyone has a Marlow and Kurtz on them. All humans have experienced the dark side of their thoughts. As human

Dr. Ni, of Psychology Today, said a manipulator can also classify as someone who manipulates facts (Johnson, Omar). For example, someone who is the two-faced withholds key information or a person who makes a victim feel like they caused their own victimization. This could describe Joseph Conrad. He used these techniques to manipulate the audience and deceive them. The author gave the reader bits and pieces of evidence to make us appreciate Marlow and dislike Kurtz. When Marlow introduces in the story, it seems as if he is on a mission to find out what the British government is doing in the African Congo, but through methods of deception, we soon find out he gets wrapped up in Kurtz's life. This could have been Joseph Conrad's plan all along. To show the audience how society distracted things look on the outside or too blind to see what is going on right in front. As a reader, one could say the story told in this deceptive manner to get the audience to make this same reflection. Who's saying that Conrad did not intend for the story to be entertaining and informative? Maybe he intended for this novella to be satirical. It would not be hard to accomplish with all of his "light" and "darkness" references. There are moments in the story where Conrad also writes things to imply that he felt the way

This is clear through his presentation of darkness always overpowering the light. Joseph Conrad has such a negative outlook on life that he believed that even light could not be trusted. "I know that the sunlight can be made to lie, too, yet one felt that no manipulation of light and pose could have conveyed the delicate shade of truthfulness upon those features" (Conrad 90). It is clear in Heart of Darkness, that the light blinds people from seeing the darkness in the world. Conrad sees the world with such a critical eye that he knows that no matter what light usually means the world is completely surrounded by darkness. Conrad continues to play with the meaning of light and darkness showing that neither is what they seem to be. In reality, Conrad is instilling the idea that light and darkness do not have any meaning along with the rest of the words used in literature. For Heart of Darkness, Conrad is showing that the darkness is used to show how literature is unable to show the precise meaning of something through language and symbols. The connection between words that are used to create a novel is arbitrary because the meaning comes from the reader. For this reason, Conrad changes the meanings in Heart of Darkness so that the reader can go astray from the commonly accepted ideas about language and realize that all words have no meaning or significance. The only way for something in literature to be understood