Heart of Darkness Introduction
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Heart of Darkness explores the complexity and ambiguity of human experience through its blurry and unclear style. Rather than simplifying meanings, the novel aims to recreate experiences in all their darkness and complexity. For Conrad, the truths of the human psyche are messy and unclear. His goal is not to shed light on darkness but to recreate his own experience of it in the reader's feelings and sensibilities. The novel examines psychological themes like primitiveness and savagery underneath civilization through its structure, images, and focus on multiplicity, ambiguity, and irony.
Heart of Darkness Introduction
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- 5. Why the Blurriness? For modern novelists, the messiness and confusion and darkness of experience is interesting Rather than trying to simplify and abstract a particular meaning from experience, novelists tend to wallow in the multiplicity of ideas and meanings and sensations that experience can provide
- 6. Why the Blurriness? Novelists are in the business of recreating and communicating the rich complexities of the experience itself. Their purpose is to get the reader to re-live an experience, with all its complexity and messiness, all its darkness and ambiguity
- 7. Conrads View For Conrad, the world as we experience it is not a sort of place that can be reduced to a set of clear, explicit truths Its truthsthe truths of the psyche, of the human mind and soulare messy, vague, irrational, suggestive, and dark Conrads intention?: to lead his readers to an experience of the heart of darkness,not to shed the light of reason on itbut to recreate his experience of darkness in our feelings, our sensibilities, our own dark and mysterious hearts
- 8. Order in the midst of Chaos HOD s Structure Three: chapters, Marlow breaks off story 3 times, stations, women, central characters Russian doll effect Images Opposition
- 9. Heart of Darkness as Modernist Novel An interest in exploring the psychological An awareness of primitiveness and savagery as the condition upon which civilization is built Multiplicity, ambiguity, irony
- 10. A Final Thought Multiplicity, ambiguity, and irony are not the easiest forms of expression to cope with when you are a student and asked to express yourself clearly and directly. But it is precisely because the world appears to us to be multiple, ambiguous, and ironic that we must strive to speak and write clearly. Otherwisethere is only darkness, only confusion
- 13. Questions to Consider as you Read: What is evil? How does the novel seem to define evil? What is good? How does the novel seem to define goodness? Consider the following definition of darkness: the absence of light