by Joseph Conrad
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Product Description
Dark allegory describes the narrator's journey up the Congo River and his meeting with, and fascination by, Mr. Kurtz, a mysterious personage who dominates the unruly inhabitants of the region. Masterly blend of adventure, character development, psychological penetration. Considered by many Conrad's finest, most enigmatic story.
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
"A snail, crawling on the edge of a razor-blade and living. That is my dream.", 2008-05-23
Most of the lower rated reviews reflect the views of students, compelled to read the novel to pass a class who are proportionately resentful of it. I was one of those students once, but I found this to be a respite from the typical "politically correct"-anemic-emasculated Literat bilge one's forced fed ad nauseum in public schooling. Get the edition with The Secret Sharer and minus all the tartuffe commentaries, ect. Great story, but no one ought to be compelled to read it.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Ideal and Realistic, 2008-05-13
Joseph Conrad's book, "Heart of Darkness" is the ideal choice for any high school student choosing a novel from their class reading list. Being under 200 pages in length this book works with a student's busy loaded schedule, attention span and most of all grabs their attention. Overlooking the blatant racism implemented by most colonial nations during the rush for imperialism this book is accurate to the effects and general events which transpired during this period. The outlook and comments towards the African people by their colonial oppressors is mild compared with other novels written in the early 1900's. With all the description of the surroundings and events in this book, it drags you into its pages and putting it down becomes a struggle.
The amount of symbolism in this book is amazing and refers to all aspects of human life, greed, moral standings, duty and much more. Constant description and detail is the perfect tool to awaken the imagination and the creativity of the reader. Symbolism is dripping from every paragraph along with imagery concerning anything from the unknown, the overwhelming and clamping effect of the river, the dark abyss which represents the jungle, and the natives and their fierce and alien but intriguing actions. This novel, now over 100 years old, can safely be called a classic and an extremely interesting read for any age old enough to understand the effects of early imperialism.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
A Captivating Tale, 2008-03-20
The fiction, and the non-fiction. The prose are not for the unexperienced reader. Part of this great story explains of the ills of colonialism at the turn of the century. It posits probably, an accurate account of what one may have seen on the ground and "up country" at that time. Conrad certainly opens the pages of man's baseness, his sordidness. I eagerly anticipate reading his other works.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Human Nature., 2007-11-12
This book is beautifully disturbing at how well it describes the fall of man to his primal state.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
"Mistah Kurtz--he dead." An influential work on five 20th century seminal works, 2007-10-20
I read this book for a graduate Humanities course. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, written in 1899 is a seminal work about the ills of colonialism, as well as a postmodern look at the subject of mankind. Conrad's book had a crucial influence on five important works of the twentieth century: J. G. Frazier's book The Golden Bough. Jessie L. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, T. S. Elliott's poem the Waste Land, Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, and Francis Ford Coppolla's movie Apocalypse Now, screenplay by John Milius, was based on Conrad's book. Another interesting fact is that this work was read by Orson Welle's Mercury Theater Players on the radio and was to be his first movie. After doing some work on it he abandoned the project to do Citizen Kane! I would have loved to of seen what Welles could have done with this story. Conrad's story is so riveting in part, because he himself served as a riverboat captain. High school teachers and college professors who have discussed this book in thousands of classrooms over the years tend to do so in terms of Freud, Jung, and Nietzsche; of classical myth, Victorian innocence, and original sin; of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism.
Just a taste of the plot reels you in! Marlow, the narrator of Heart of Darkness and Conrad's alter ego, is hired by an ivory-trading company to sail a steamboat up an unnamed river whose shape on the map resembles "an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country and its tail lost in the depths of the land" (8). His destination is a post where the company's brilliant, ambitious star agent, Mr. Kurtz, is stationed. Kurtz has collected legendary quantities of ivory, but, Marlow learns along the way, is also rumored to have sunk into unspecified savagery. Marlow's steamer survives an attack by blacks and picks up a load of ivory and the ill Kurtz; Kurtz, talking of his grandiose plans, dies on board as they travel, downstream.
Sketched with only a few bold strokes, Kurtz's image has nonetheless remained in the memories of millions of readers: the lone white agent far up the great river, with his dreams of grandeur,his great store of precious ivory, and his fiefdom carved out of the African jungle. Perhaps more than anything, we remember Marlow, on the steamboat, looking through binoculars at what he thinks are ornamental knobs atop the fence posts in front of Kurtz's house and then finding that each is "black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids-a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth" (57).
I especially became interested in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness from the movie Apocalypse Now. There is a scene in the movie that shows Colonel Kurtz's nightstand in his cave. T. S. Elliott's poem the Waste Land is one of three books on the nightstand. The other two are Jessie L. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, and J. G. Frazier's book The Golden Bough. Anyone wanting to understand the movie Apocalypse Now, especially the character of Colonel Kurtz, and what Milius and Copolla are trying to tell their audience need to read these three books as well as Conrad's Heart of Darkness!
As a graduate student reading in philosophy and history I recommend this book for anyone interested in literature, myth, history, philosophy, religion and fans of Apocalypse Now.
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