However, Conrad’s time in Africa wreaked havoc on his health, so he returned to England to get recovered. He returned to Africa twice before finishing Almayer’s Folly in 1894 and wrote several other books, including one called Youth which is about Marlow, A Narrative, before Heart of Darkness in 1898. He wrote most of his other major works—including Lord Jim, Nostromo, and The Secret Agent, as well as several others with Ford Madox Ford — during the following two decades.
Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous jungle novels, is based on Conrad’s diary in 1890 when he was on the journey to Congo. On a cruising yawl at rest on Thames, the narrator, Marlow is telling his story about his travel along another river and the legend of an agent in the jungle. He is appointed by a company that gathers ivory in Congo. Even though the journey seems quite arduous and somewhat elusive, Marlow, who is always passionate about travel and exploration, sets out his adventure. From the very beginning to the end, what he sees and hears are the dark Africa where the trade agents are greedily gathering ivories, seizing and grabbing the natives brutally, especially when he witnesses the fable about Kurtz. As a well-educated white, Kurtz, who has the talent of eloquence as his trump card, is arbitrarily ruling his empire but blindly worshipped by the natives as a saint. The works provides a bridge between Victorian values and the ideals of modernism. Like much of the best modernist literature produced in the early decades of the 20th century, Heart of Darkness is as much about alienation, confusion, and profound doubt as it is about imperialism. Imperialism is nevertheless at the center of Heart of Darkness. By the 1890s, most of the world’s “dark places” had been placed at least normally under European control, and the major European powers were stretched thin, trying to administrate and protect massive, far-flung empires. Cracks were beginning to appear in the system: riots, wars, and the wholesale abandonment of commercial enterprises all threatened the white men living in the distant corners of empires. Things were clearly falling apart.
Heart of Darkness suggests that this is the natural result when men face the lure from beauty, money, power and so on. At the same time, this begs the question of whether it is possible to call an inpidual insane or wrong when he is part of a system that is so thoroughly corrupted and corrupting.
Heart of Darkness, thus at its most abstract level, is a narrative about the difficulty of understanding the world beyond the self, about the ability of one man to judge another (Stamplf 23). Darkness is the theme of this story. It is the clue to find out the context of the story. Conrad makes an integral connection between mind, body and nature by this application. Darkness is also the color of the places where explorers and colonialists settled, and the color of the black’s skin. In contrast to the darkness, the white seems extremely outstanding. But their white skin, the colonists have a heart of profound darkness, evil and fear.
This paper pided into five parts, the first part describes the hero, then explains the nature through psycho analysis in the second part. The third part exposes phenomenon including bad-rooted nature in real life, then gets the conclusion. The purpose of the study is to spur society to realize the side influence and return harmonious society.
Ⅱ. Kurtz in the Center of Darkness
2.1 Helpless Man in the Indifferent World 英文论文约瑟夫•康拉德《黑暗之心》(2):http://www.youerw.com/yingyu/lunwen_5788.html