What Is The Theme Of Isolation In Heart Of Darkness

Temptations in the Wilderness: On Isolation in Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad’s novel, Heart of Darkness, follows the narration of Marlow, a former steamship captain, and his journey deep into the Congo. As the novel begins, Marlow ponders the way in which the Romans saw a Celtic Britain. He imagines that they saw the now golden land as a dark, savage wilderness void of civilization and culture. He recounts the dreariness of the office the company interviews him in, and the strange old women, weaving wool dark as night in the Mariana Trench, whom he likens to the Fates. Following a trivial interview and disturbing physical examination, Marlow boards a ship, sails to the Congo, and begins a two hundred mile trek to the Central Station. As he

Near the end of section II of the novel, Marlow and his crew find the Russian, a man that wanders in the wilds for almost two years. Before meeting him, Marlow discovers his (the Russian’s) station in shambles, and a how to guide on working the machines inside of a steamship. They find him terribly confused, jittery, and quite well out of his mind saying crazy things such as, “You don’t talk with that man-you listen to him…Brother sailor…honor…pleasure…delight…introduce yourself…Russian…son of an arch-priest…I tell you this man has enlarged my mind!” (80, 81). Once he manages to stumble back into civilization, the Russian meets Kurtz, and almost immediately, along with the natives, worships him like a god. The isolation leaves his mind hopelessly lost, and never able to recover his wits, the Russian becomes nothing more than a mindless follower of the man who seems to have it all; Kurtz. However; the isolation affects Marlow differently. He perseveres through the trials and temptations of the Congo, but returns from the heart of darkness a changed and broken man. In reflection of his time immediately following his return Marlow says, “I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people…They trespassed upon my thoughts…because they could not possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing was offensive to me like the outrageous

In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, isolation and solitude encapsulate both the novel and the main theme, and her main characters, Victor and the Monster, embody the destructive power of isolation. At the end of volume III, Walton, the letter writer at the opening and closing of the novel, describes the dreadful state that Victor remains in. He writes, “ Yet he enjoys one comfort, the offspring of solitude and delirium: he believes, that when in dreams he holds converse with his friends, and derives from that… that they are not the creations of his fancy, but the beings themselves.” (Shelley 193). Victor, having experienced horror that no other human could imagine, lives in the limbo of isolation, which he likens to that of Lucifer in Paradise Lost. The stress and trauma that he undergoes leaves him with the firm belief that he can commune with the souls of his dead friends and loved ones, leaving him lost and oscillating between sanity and insanity. His isolation led to his discovery, his creation, his downfall, and finally his own demise. And through his solitude, Victor dooms the Monster to the same fate. As soon as he brings the Monster into the world, it becomes a living demon, scourged by humans because of its grotesque appearance, and reveals its true capacity for evil and destruction. The Monster torments Victor until he dies,