The Meaning of the "Heart of Darkness"


     While I was reading Heart of Darkness, I realized there was a recurring word that seemed to have a lot of meaning associated with it.  That word and a variation of it were “darkness” and “dark”.  First of all, I knew it must have importance in the book because it appears in the title itself.  Before I started reading the book, I looked at the title and wondered how Conrad would intertwine it into the story and what it really meant.  After finishing, I believe he meant for it to be symbolic and more than just representative of the deepest parts of Africa.  I think that Conrad was actually alluding to the heart of Kurtz.  More specifically, how Africa changed his heart to one of greed and disrespect for the native people.  As I started to read though, darkness was brought up in a different manner by Marlow.  He and his fellow crew members were on the Thames river, and he stated that it too was once one of the dark places of the earth, yet it was populated now.  This is what stirred up his memory of traveling to Africa, a place that was blank on his map as a child, and meeting Kurtz.  Marlow had a moment of realization that darkness was all around before, and men went into the darkness, just as he did himself.  I believe Conrad reiterated these words throughout the book because they communicate his primary message.  As I said before, I think that Kurtz had the “heart of darkness”, but overall Conrad wanted to convey more generally that the heart of darkness was in all men.  At the end of the book, after Marlow has finished telling his memories of his journey up the Congo, he says, “The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky-seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness” (Conrad 72).  I took this line as Conrad’s final message in the book: there is a force that people cannot control, and though it may seem harmless at first, it leads people to have evil ways, whether they see it coming or not.   

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