See It Now

“He struggled with himself, too. I saw it -- I heard it. I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.” (Conrad, 140). This isolation and internal conflict, within Kurtz, is the epitome of what occurs when one is caught in a seemingly inescapable situation; losing all unnecessary components of life and relying purely on instinct and intuition. Joseph Conrad compels the readers to question the ways of thinking that…

THIS IS NOT DONE!! “Don 't care what people say Just follow your own way Don 't give up and use the chance To return to innocence That 's not the beginning of the end That 's the return to yourself The return to innocence” – Return To Innocence by Enigma (15-21). Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, published in 1990 is a semi-fiction and semi non-fiction book about the stories of O’Brien, his troops in Vietnam at war, and their loved ones back in America. In 1986, Oliver Stone released a…

Modernism gave rise in the nineteenth century and went through the twentieth century. Modernism is classified as a philosophical movement to modify the old traditional beliefs with modern society. Modern literary writers often represent the world as a fragmented and chaotic place that has lost the faith the previous generations once had. Two such modern authors are Leo Tolstoy who wrote The Death of Ivan Ilych and Joseph Conrad who wrote Heart of Darkness. It may seem that these two novels have…

Joseph Concrad’s Hard of Darkness Heart of Darkness follows one man's nightmarish journey into the interior of Africa Aboard a British ship called the Nellie, three men listen to a dude named Marlow recount his journey into Africa as an agent for the Company, a Belgian ivory trading firm. Along the way, he witnesses brutality and hate between colonizers and the native African people, becomes entangled in a power struggle within the Company, and finally learns the truth about the mysterious Kurtz…

Apocalypse Now, made in 1979, was a film about the 1954-1975 Vietnam War, along with the psychological effects and how it’s caused a social issue. This war of “aerial bombing and small guerilla skirmishes” was a very “unpopular war”, as Eric Foner says in Give Me Liberty: Fourth Edition. It is also known that this war was America’s longest war lasting a little over 20 years. As shown in the film, it was a brutal, gruesome, and unwinnable war that only one couldn’t imagine. It is quoted in the…

Some critics argue that Conrad is exposing colonialism in his novel, one of those critics is H. S. Zins who claims that:" when Conrad was writing his anti–colonial and anti–imperial Heart of Darkness. In that African novella he described imperialism as robbery with violence" (1). This is true when he describes the Belgian colonization of Africa, but when he describes the British colonization he praises it and celebrating imperialism. Said in his book Culture and Imperialism states that: "Yet…

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is one of the most known novels in English literature. The story begins when Marlow, who works for a Belgian company, went on a journey to the heart of Africa as a steamship captain. Through his journey, he heard the name of Kurtz for the first time. Then the name repeated many times which made Marlow, who is our narrator in addition to another unknown narrator, interested to know about Kurtz. Kurtz works for the company as an ivory trader in the Congo which was…

The novella Heart of Darkness written by Joseph Conrad in 1899, which is set in the Congo, Africa in 1890. It is based on the narrator Charles Marlow travels to the Congo, in the heart of Africa to relieve a brilliant ivory trader named Krutz, who is working for the Belgium Government. Rudyard Kipling described Imperialism as the “White man’s burden” as in his writings he shows that European countries were travelling to help stabilize and grow the economy in countries that needed it. However,…

led to many violence and killings. Marlow was assigned to pick up several documents and reports from the inner circle where he meets Kurtz, head of an ivory sector, also known to be a cruel ruler to the natives. From the following characters, we can see just how humans could treat,…

Boesman and Lena The stage play ‘Boesman and Lena’ is a play set in 1983 written by playwright Athol Fugard. Athol Fugard centres the play on three characters from the Eastern Cape, Boesman, Lena and Outa. The play depicts the aftermath of the forced removals during the Apartheid Era and the results for many in real life at the time. This play also channels many concepts, including that of absurdity. Other themes of identity, displacement and alienation can be seen in the play too. This essay…