The Experience of Alienation and Existential Crisis

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Recommended: Culture Shock: an Inevitable Experience

The unique features of a local environment always give special characteristics to its inhabitants. The living environment has a large influence on people. For example, customs, traditions and cultural changes in their environment due to the psychological and ideological. With the development of society, people are not limited to living in their own home, for various reasons, will go a different place to live or work. However, strange and adapt to a new environment for the first time will become more evident, and even feel alienated and existential crisis. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih and As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner are three novels, which deal in one way or another with the experience of alienation and existential crisis. The main character Kurtz in Heart of Darkness representing the mystery of the Congo insolubility of magic, he thought he had achieved the ideal in place and has conquered the wilderness, but the fact is that his mind was occupied by the wilderness. In Season of Migration to the North, Mustafa is a highly intelligent and solipsistic worldview person, but because of his learning experience, making him died in the cracks of different cultures, and ultimately committed suicide because he cannot find a way to exist. Addie was influenced by her father in childhood, aspires a sense of existence and feel alone, finally die with hopelessness from the bottom of her heart. All these three characters experience alienation and existential crisis, but the way they handle it is different.
In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the main character Kurtz is a hero in the eyes of Europeans, who had been a musician, poets, painters and reporters. He came to Congo 's main p...

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...h, alone with him, that no one can understand him. Addie lives in her father's influence, the loneliness accompanied her. She wants to be concerned for others but does not know how to do it, with a very extreme way to prove her existence, but in the end she still does not get out of the shadows. The influence of culture on people is huge, it can let a person feel full and rich, but also can let a person antipathetic, sense of loneliness, alienation and existential crisis.

Works Cited

Salih, Tayeb. Season of migration to the north. New York: Michael Kesend Publishing, Ltd. 1989. Print.
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. London: Penguin classics, 2007. Print.
Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying: The Corrected Text. New York: Vintage, 1990. Print.
"Alienation and Lonliness in Heart of Darkness." Prezi.com. Ed. Danielle Staudte. N.p., 21 Jan. 2014. Web. 28 Apr. 2014.

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