Heart of Darkness Idealist and Realist views

Most teenagers and adults see the world in a negative way because of the experiences that they’ve gone through while attending high school. Generally, most kids younger than high schoolers think that everything will end up the way that they want it to. The author Joseph Conrad sees the world for what it really is. He represents his view of the world in the novel Heart of Darkness by portraying himself as the main character, Marlow, who is a dedicated realist in his view of life, whereas in Kurtz’s point of view, he renders more of the idealist view of life. Marlow begins his story in a way that shows the darkness in everything and throughout his narrative, it only gets deeper into his mind which is immensely dark. Kurtz is the opposite of Marlow. He is effortlessly manipulated by the way of life and can be sucked into the culture of the natives rather easily. As shown in this novel, no one has their happy ending whether they’re realists or idealists.

Conrad describes Marlow in such an intimate way that no one else would be able to see in Marlow unless they actually knew him personally. The novel starts with Marlow sharing his memories with the people on the ship. He tells his story in great depth and throughout telling it, he gets more and more into himself. “And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth.” (55.) You can see that he is talking about his mind and the darkness that lies within it. From the first three pages of the book, there were definite signs of darkness shown through Marlow. He described the world as being dark and almost as if he knew all of the secrets the world contained. As a child, Marlow found himself wanting to go to the “blank spaces” of a map which was foreshadowin...

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...d it. Even if Marlow is a realist and Kurtz is an idealist, they still experience the same disconsolate world. The difference between the two of them is how they deal with it and what they do to adjust into the environment that they’re in. Kurtz for example used his native people to not acknowledge what was going on around him and he put ruling them ahead of any problems that he experienced. Marlow shows a lot of darkness in his point of view which shows that he is a definite realist. He isn’t complaining but instead describing how he feels in the world that he lives in. He feels this way because he has nothing to believe in and no hope which is what the majority of what all realists feel at some point of their life. Both Kurtz and Marlow experienced pain and darkness in their views of life. One of them it took death to see and the other had been living with it.