Nietzsche's Ambiguity

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Joseph Conrad’s magnum opus Heart of Darkness acts as a paradigm of late colonial fiction and is often considered one of the greatest works of the modern era. In his novella, Conrad details the story of Charlie Marlow as he descends through the Congo river, leading him deep into the unknown African continent. The story explores attitudes on colonialism and racism and consequently calls into question that which constitutes a barbaric or civilized society. Another contemporaneous thinker, Friedrich Nietzsche, also tackled the issue of primitive and civilized man through his use of the Apollonian and Dionysian in the Birth of Tragedy. In this work, Nietzsche establishes a reciprocal connection between Dionysian ekstasis and civilized Apollonian restraint, and thereafter connects the two through the Greek Attic Tragedy. While upon first reading it may seem as if the two writers construct a strict polarity between civilization and primitivism, both Nietzsche and Conrad are in fact calling attention to the ambiguity of the two designations. Therefore, what seems to be in the order of a bipolar opposition near the inception of the work begins to break down into a much more …show more content…

In it, Nietzsche describes the Dionysian as analogous with the fundamental driving force of all life; that is, the innermost unchanging essence of living things. The Dionysian is most commonly associated with darkness, unity, ekstasis, instinct, essence, and music. In Heart of Darkness, the Dionysian could be analogous to nature and people when they enter a natural environment. In humans, the Dionysian appears in the form of instincts and primordial desires. Thus, while humans transcend these primal instincts, they intrinsically carry some level of repressed

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