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Reality and Illusion in Heart of Darkness
Fact is very important to Marlow. Facts are comprehensible. Evil isn’t a supernatural force or a force in opposition to god or life, but that which is incomprehensible to Marlow. The life of the Africans and the power of the jungle—or the larger reality of humanity—is evil in its incomprehensibility. The supreme morality is restraint, and comprehension of the jungle or acceptance of its incomprehensibility becomes symbolic for the absence of restraint in man. Purpose is good in its comprehensibility. When Marlow speaks derisively of the French man-of-war shelling an invisible ‘enemy’ to no purpose it is because he finds its actions ‘incomprehensible.’ Before Marlow becomes engaged in the jungle, what he finds supremely comprehensible, what he feels gives purpose, is nature, and he recognizes meaning as sound, voice, or movement.
‘The idleness of a passenger, my isolation amongst all these men with whom I had no point of contact, the oily and languid sea, the uniform sombreness of the coast, seemed to keep me away from the truth of things, within the toil of a mournful and senseless delusion. The voice of the surf heard now and then was a positive pleasure, like the speech of a brother. It was something natural, that had its reason, that had a meaning.’ (Conrad, 40).
This early passage shows Marlow’s affinity for sound (especially speech or voice), movement, and labor. Marlow’s reality when he embarks for the Congo is defined primarily by work, distinguished by movement, represented by voice, and saturated with meaning. As he goes deeper into the heart of darkness this reality alters and silence is the bearer of meaning that Marlow refuses to understand. Work becomes p...
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...ilanthropy implied is a ‘sentimental pretence’ and not an ‘idea’, is merely an arrogance conceived by civilized, deluded man. But one that he would, nevertheless, like to embody.
Works Cited
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Editor Robert Kimbrough. New York: Norton, 1988.
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Editor Paul O’Prey. Middlesex: Penquin Books Ltd., 1983.
Cox, C. B. Conrad: Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, and Under Western Eyes. London: Macmillan Education Ltd., 1987.
Guetti, James. ‘Heart of Darkness and the Failure of the Imagination’, Sewanee Review LXXIII, No. 3 (Summer 1965), pp. 488-502. Ed. C. B. Cox.
Ruthven, K. K. ‘The Savage God: Conrad and Lawrence,’ Critical Quarterly, x, nos 1& 2 (Spring and Summer 1968), pp. 41-6. Ed. C. B. Cox.
Watts, Cedric. A Preface to Conrad. Essex: Longman Group UK Limited, 1993.
After reading Newjack, I clearly appreciate the difficulty, the chaos and the stress of an officers' job. I am less sure how they manage to do it, and I wonder at what cost to their sense of self it has on them. By contrast, with a few well-chosen stories, Conover humanizes individual prisoners: one who has lines from Anne Frank's diary tattooed on his back; a prisoner on the serving line who tries to sneak extra food to his friends; a young, emotionally needy prisoner grasping for attention from anyone, even an officer. As a result, the prisoners are often drawn “with more humanity” than the staff.
In writing the book Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, Conover undergoes a transformation as a correctional officer in order to expose the problems within our prison systems. The reader learns a lot about what is taking place in prisons right now and what it is like to be a guard, but in sum what one must foremost take into account is that this is not how prisons how they have to be. There are social, political, and economic realities that have constructed this system and in order to dispel them it is more beneficial to understand these factors rather than one man’s experience in a place of power at one prison.
Hartsfield –Jackson Atlanta International Airport (n.d.). Case Study. Airport Master Plan – Demand/Capacity Analysis and Facility Requirements Summary. Retrieved from
Watts, Cedric. 'Heart of Darkness.' The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad. Ed. J.H. Stape. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 45-62.
Tessitore, John. "Freud, Conrad, and Heart of Darkness." Modern Critical Interpretations." Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987. 91-103.
Cox, C. B. Conrad: Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, and Under Western Eyes. London: Macmillan Education Ltd., 1987.
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of darkness and other tales. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Print.
The Harlem Renaissance was a period of flowering throughout literature and culture for African Americans in America. These growths can be traced back to the musical traditions, black folklore, and folk cultural ways of the African Americans prior to the Harlem Renaissance. Each of these aspects empowered the African Americans to reach the freedom that they deserved. It was a continuous fight but their cohesiveness strengthened their fight.
In the essay “Learning to Read and Write,” Frederick Douglass illustrates how he successfully overcome the tremendous difficulties to become literate. He also explains the injustice between slavers and slaveholders. Douglass believes that education is the key to freedom for slavers. Similarly, many of us regard education as the path to achieve a career from a job.
Content area literacy, as with all learning, should directly relate to the students’ lives. When students can relate to a subject, they retain the information better and are more excited to learn. Relating subjects to students’ lives provides them with the desire to participate in the lesson and make connections with previous experiences. Lee (2014) wrote that “culture is the primary medium through which humans learn” (p. 10). Connecting the readings to students’ lives helps them activate their prior knowledge of culture and experience and allows them to transfer it to their learning.
* 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.
Conrad, J. (2006). Heart of darkness. In P. B. Armstrong (Ed.), Heart of darkness (4th ed., p. 50). New York London: Norton Critical Editions.
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness 3rd ed. Ed. Robert Kimbrough. New York: Norton Critical, 1988.