Heart Of Darkness Analytical Essay

The heart is engulfed in darkness, once the mind becomes corrupted. This idea creates Joseph Conrad’s 104 page novella, Heart of Darkness. In Heart of Darkness, Conrad illustrates colonial power twists a man’s heart. Conrad uses characterization to demonstrate how the greedy power can darken the heart. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad takes place in the Congo of Africa. The protagonist is Charlie Marlow, an English seaman, who enters the Congo on a steamboat in search of a man named Kurtz. Charlie Marlow is the central narrator of the novella. The main antagonist is indeed Mr. Kurtz himself, the star agent of The Company who worked in true Ivory County in the interior of Africa. The other antagonists include: the pilgrims, the natives, the manager, and even Mr. Kurtz’s fiancée. The story begins with an unnamed peripheral narrator introducing our central narrator, Charlie Marlow on a British ship called the Nellie as Marlow recounts his trip into the Congo with an Ivory firm. Marlow explains he was a captain of a steamboat that strode along a river in the Congo, examining each station as they moved along. To his surprise he witnessed horrid, brutal, and dark scenes of mistreated natives. Along the voyage, he met a man who spoke of a mysterious guy named Kurtz, Mr. Kurtz. Around the same time Marlow discovered his steamboat had been …show more content…
Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts, that there was something wanting in him―Whether he knew of this deficiency himself I cannot say. I think the knowledge came to him at last―only at the last. But the wilderness had found him out early and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude―and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.