NAME: BILAL AFRIDI

ID NO: 13735
PAPER: MODERN NOVEL
TEACHER:MAM AISHA
ZEB

QUESTION NO 5
ANSWER:
:Passage to India is divided into three parts:
Mosque
Cave
Temple.
In many ways, I think that Forster might be
suggesting that there is division present in parts
one and three. This helps to bring out the idea
that India is going to be a divided land
internally and indigenous based on its partitions
established through religion and culture.
The "Mosque" to open the book and
the "Temple" to close it is reflective of this in its
references to Muslims and Hindus. It is also
enhanced by the cool, dry season to open it and
the monsoon rains to close it. In this book
ending structure, there is collision and there is
difference. There is a lack of convergence and
rather much in way of divergence, seeming as if
the Earth is opening up its natural divisions.
Interestingly enough, the middle section is
where there is the most amount of separation
and antagonism between English and Indians.
Yet, it is this section where I think that Forster
might be suggesting that there is the most
unity. The presence of the caves, themselves,
is part of this calculus. When Forster describes
the internal nature of the cave, he focuses on
their darkness as well as their sense of
overwhelming all differences.
All sounds in the cave, whether it is a call
to Allah, a call to the Queen, or a call to any of
the Hindu deities, results in a "Boum" sound.
This helps to construct reality as one where
there is no difference between anyone or
anything. If Aziz and Adela kissed in the cave,
no one could tell the difference whether an
Anglo or an Indian touched one another. The
merging of identity is where the cave stands,
and it might be a stylistic and thematic
technique on Forster's part to place this in the
middle, a statement that there can be a realm
where antagonistic difference goes away in the
face of homogeneity. Yet, I think that this is
fleeting, like the match struck in the cave,
racing towards its own extinction with life
outside of it as being defined by "Temple" and
"Mosque."
Each part corresponds to an emotional and plot
emphasis. In the first part, readers are
introduced to the range of Moslem and British
characters that are the primary focus of the
novel. The single most important character in
the novel is the Moslem doctor, Dr. Aziz. He
encounters an important British character, Mrs.
Moore, at his mosque. When he discovers that
Mrs. Moore has known enough to leave her
shoes at the entrance to the mosque, he feels a
friendship for her that persists throughout the
novel. She is in India to try to see to the
engagement of her son Ronny to a young
woman named Miss Quested. Dr. Aziz is a
widower with three children. The two British
women desire to see a more authentic side
of India than what is possible through British
clubs and theatre performances. Dr. Aziz
arranges an excursion for them to the Marabar
caves.

QUESTION#3
ANSWER:
Heart of Darkness Symbols:
Symbolism operates throughout Heart of
Darkness to create an ethical context for the
work.

1. Darkness:
The symbol of darkness opens the
novella, when Marlow is on the yacht on the
Thames: "And this also," he says, speaking of
England, "has been one of the dark places on
earth." He means that the land and its peoples
were primitive before the Roman conquest, a
parallel to European colonial control of Africa.
Light and peace is here now, Marlow implies,
but "darkness was here yesterday."
 The most important metaphoric
darkness is that revealed in Kurtz's heart and
symbolized by the decapitated heads of native
men displayed like decorative knobs on his
fence posts. There, they are "black, dried,
sunken, with closed eyelids." These heads and
the grisly fence stand as enduring symbols of
Kurtz's depravity. Kurtz, then, symbolizes the
darkness of the colonizers' lost morality, but
there is also a sense in which Kurtz is the victim
of the darkness of the jungle. Marlow comments
on "how many powers of darkness claimed him
for their own" in trying to explain his descent
into depravity.

2. River:
It is the most important symbol of the
novel so far as descriptive writing is concerned.
It plays the role of a divider and separates
Marlowe from the evil and cunning tricks of
Kurtz. River also allows Marlowe to see both
sides of the continent. The difference between
so-called civilization and humanity, evil and
good, white-men and Africans. In literature,
mostly sea and rivers symbolize for life and in
Heart of Darkness too, somehow Congo River
symbolizes for life. It symbolizes life for the
reason that it is mixture of good and evil. In
addition, when Marlowe reaches at the center of
Congo river, it slows his boat’s speed. It gives
us hint that the process of recognizing innersole
is slower. In this way, Congo and climate of the
novel are also two important symbols of “Heart
of Darkness”.

The river also seems to want to

expel Europeans from Africa altogether: its
current makes travel upriver slow and difficult,
but the flow of water makes travel downriver,
back toward “civilization,” rapid and seemingly
inevitable. Marlow’s struggles with the river as
he travels upstream toward Kurtz reflect his
struggles to understand the situation in which
he has found himself. The ease with which he
journeys back downstream, on the other hand,
mirrors his acquiescence to Kurtz and his
“choice of nightmares

3. Ivory:
Ivory symbolizes the greed of the Europeans. It
is a consuming passion for them, the lure that
draws them to Africa. It has become like a
religion to them: "The word 'ivory' rang in the
air," Marlow says when he is at the Outer
Station. It "was whispered, was sighed. You
would think they were praying to it." Ivory,
which is white, is the one thing of value that the
Europeans in Heart of Darkness find in dark
Africa. But ivory is also equated with darkness
and corruption. Marlow muses that Kurtz had
been captivated by the wilderness, which had
"taken him, loved him, embraced him,
consumed his flesh" until he had lost all his hair,
his bald head now looking like an "ivory ball."
When Kurtz is on the verge of dying, just before
he says his last words, Marlow notes his "ivory
face." Ivory no longer has value; it is a thing of
evil, which is what Kurtz became.

White-men entered in Africa not for the

purpose of making it a civilized country but to
get more and more ivory. Apparently, they
were working for their welfare but in a true
sense they wanted their resources. Evil attitude
of whites is evident in different parts of the
novel and ivory is symbol of it. Africans have
resources and white-men know how to grab
them. Hence, in the guise of civilization and
colonialism they entered in Africa and grasped
their resources.

QUESTION#2
 ANSWER:

Themes:
There are some major themes of the heart of darkness which
are given below.

1.Madness as a Result of Imperialism.

2. Moral Corruption.

3.The Absurdity of Evil.

4.Alienation and Isolation.

5. Hollowness

6.Sanity and insanity

7.Race and Racism.

Madness as a Result of
1.

Imperialism:
Madness is closely linked to imperialism in this book. Africa is
responsible for mental disintegration as well as physical
illness. Madness has two primary functions. First, it serves as
an ironic device to engage the reader’s sympathies. Kurtz,
Marlow is told from the beginning, is mad. However, as
Marlow, and the reader, begin to form a more complete picture
of Kurtz, it becomes apparent that his madness is only
relative, that in the context of the Company insanity is difficult
to define. Thus, both Marlow and the reader begin to
sympathize with Kurtz and view the Company with suspicion.
Madness also functions to establish the necessity of social
fictions. Although social mores and explanatory justifications
are shown throughout Heart of Darkness to be utterly false
and even leading to evil, they are nevertheless necessary for
both group harmony and individual security. Madness, in
Heart of Darkness, is the result of being removed from one’s
social context and allowed to be the sole arbiter of one’s own
actions. Madness is thus linked not only to absolute power
and a kind of moral genius but to man’s fundamental fallibility:
Kurtz has no authority to whom he answers but himself, and
this is more than any one man can bear.

2.Moral Corruption:
Moral corruption is another underlying theme of the novel,
Heart of Darkness. Kurtz goes to Congo to civilize the locals.
However, he becomes a top agent of the company in robbing
the locals of their treasure and exporting ivory. He is engaged
in corrupt practices of punishing those who oppose him and
becoming their demigod. The same goes on at the other
stations where Marlow sees many small agents engaged in
the same practices.

3.The Absurdity of Evil:

This novella is, above all, an exploration of hypocrisy,
ambiguity, and moral confusion. It explodes the idea of the
proverbial choice between the lesser of two evils. As the
idealistic Marlow is forced to align himself with either the
hypocritical and malicious colonial bureaucracy or the openly
malevolent, rule-defying Kurtz, it becomes increasingly clear
that to try to judge either alternative is an act of folly: how can
moral standards or social values be relevant in judging evil? Is
there such thing as insanity in a world that has already gone
insane? The number of ridiculous situations Marlow witnesses
act as reflections of the larger issue: at one station, for
instance, he sees a man trying to carry water in a bucket with
a large hole in it. At the Outer Station, he watches native
laborers blast away at a hillside with no particular goal in mind.
The absurd involves both insignificant silliness and life-or-
death issues, often simultaneously. That the serious and the
mundane are treated similarly suggests a profound moral
confusion and a tremendous hypocrisy: it is terrifying that
Kurtz’s homicidal megalomania and a leaky bucket provoke
essentially the same reaction from Marlow.

4.Alienation and Isolation:

Although alienation and isolation are often understood as a
psychological issue of an individual, the novel Heart of
Darkness has presented alienation and isolation of both;
psychological as well as social. Marlow’s departure hints to
social alienation and isolation which tries to rob him of his
humanity. Kurtz is the prime example of this alienation in that
he mixes up with the locals and tries to become one of them.
His alienation completes with his final outburst of “horrors”
when he comes to know the results of his actions. Marlow’s
initial Buddha-like posture, too, confirms this alienation and
isolation.

5. Hollowness:
Throughout his journey, Marlow meets an array of people
characterized by their hollow emptiness, reflecting the way
imperialism robbed Europeans of moral substance. For
instance, Marlow refers to the chatty brickmaker he meets at
the Central Station as a “papier-mâché Mephistopheles” who
has “nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe.” Despite
having a lot to say, the brickmaker’s words lack any real
meaning or value. Like a nut without the kernel inside—an
image the narrator describes at the beginning of the novella
the brickmaker’s speech is all form and no content, revealing
his obvious idleness. Marlow speaks of Kurtz in similar terms.
He describes the African wilderness whispering to Kurtz: “It
echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.”
Marlow comes to this realization of Kurtz’s emptiness after
observing the severed African heads on stakes, placed there
for no apparent reason. Like the brickmaker, Kurtz is showy
with his talk but ultimately doesn’t have much reason, since all
his ideas are morally bankrupt. Marlow develops this notion of
Kurtz as a hollow man later in the story. Although he continues
to speak forcefully, Kurtz’s physical body wastes away,
making the man a “hollow sham,” or imitation, of his former
self.

6.Sanity and insanity:

Sanity and Insanity Closely linked to the themes of order and
disorder are those of sanity and insanity. Madness, given
prolonged exposure to the isolation of the wilderness, seems
an inevitable extension of chaos. The atmospheric influences
at the heart of the African continent—the stifling heat, the
incessant drums, the whispering bush, the mysterious light—
play havoc with the unadapted European mind and reduce it
either to the insanity of thinking anything is allowable in such
an atmosphere or, as in Kurtz’s case, to literal madness.
Kurtz, after many years in the jungle, is presented as a man
who has gone mad with power and greed. No restraints were
placed on him—either from above, from a rule of law, or from
within, from his own conscience. In the wilderness, he came to
believe he was free to do whatever he liked, and the freedom
drove him mad. Small acts of madness line Marlow’s path to
Kurtz: the Man−of−War that fires into the bush for no apparent
reason, the urgently needed rivets that never arrive, the bricks
that will never be built, the jig that is suddenly danced, the
immense hole dug for no discernible purpose. All these events
ultimately lead to a row of impaled severed human heads and
Kurtz, a man who, in his insanity, has conferred a godlike
status on himself and has ritual human sacrifices performed
for him. The previously mentioned themes of solitude and
silence have here achieved their most powerful effect: they
have driven Kurtz mad. He is presented as a voice, a
disembodied head, a mouth that opens as if to devour
everything before him. Kurtz speaks of “my ivory … my
intended … my river my station,” as if everything in the Congo
belonged to him. This is the final arrogant insanity of the white
man who comes supposedly to improve a land, but stays to
exploit, ravage, and destroy it.

7.Race and Racism :

The subject of racism is not really treated by Conrad as a
theme in Heart of Darkness as much as it is simply shown to
be the prevailing attitude of the day. The African natives are
referred to as “n’s,” “cannibals,” “criminals,” and “savages.”
European colonizers see them as a subordinate species and
chain, starve, rob, mutilate, and murder them without fear of
punishment. The book presents a damning account of
imperialism as it illustrates the white man’s belief in his innate
right to come into a country inhabited by people of a different
race and pillage to his heart’s content. Kurtz is writing a
treatise for something called the “International Society for the
Suppression of Savage Customs.” This implies the existence
of a worldwide movement to subjugate all non-white races.
Kurtz bestows a kind of childlike quality upon the Africans by
saying that white people appear to them as supernatural
beings. The natives do, indeed, seem to have worshipped
Kurtz as a god and to have offered up human sacrifices to
him. This innocence proceeds, in Kurtz’s view, from an inferior
intelligence and does not prevent him from concluding that the
way to deal with the natives is to exterminate them all. Early in
his journey, Marlow sees a group of black men paddling boats.
He admires their naturalness, strength, and vitality, and
senses that they want nothing from the land but to coexist with
it. This notion prompts him to believe that he still belongs to a
world of reason. The feeling is short−lived, however, for it is
not long before Marlow, too, comes to see the Africans as
some subhuman form of life and to use the language of his
day in referring to them as “creatures,” “niggers,” “cannibals,”
and “savages.” He does not protest or try to interfere when he
sees six Africans forced to work with chains about their necks.
He calls what he sees in their eyes the “deathlike indifference
of unhappy savages.” Marlow exhibits some humanity in
offering a dying young African one of the ship’s biscuits, and
although he regrets the death of his helmsman, he says he
was “a savage who was no more account than a grain of sand
in a black Sahara.” It is not the man he misses so much as his
function as steersman. Marlow refers to the “savage who was
fireman” as “an improved specimen.” He compares him,
standing before his vertical boiler, to “a dog in a parody of
breeches and a feather hat, walking on his hind legs.

QUESTION#1

ANSWER:
Plot Summary:

The story begins at dusk on the deck of a cruising yawl, the

Nellie, moored in the Thames estuary. An unnamed narrator
sits with four friends, one of whom, Marlow, begins to tell the
clearly traumatic story of his journey on another river. After a
number of false starts, Marlow describes how he goes to
Brussels where a trading company recommended by his aunt
appoints him as a riverboat captain in the Congo. He travels
by ship to take up his post. He is disgusted by what he sees of
the greed of the ivory traders and the brutal way in which they
exploit the natives upon his arrival.

Marlow hears about the most remarkable and successful ivory

trader of all, Mr. Kurtz, who is stationed in the heart of the
country, at the company’s Outer Station. Marlow goes out to
find him, first making a tough cross-country trek to the
company’s Central Station. While there, he finds that the
steamboat he is to command on the journey upriver to find
Kurtz has been destroyed mysteriously. He hears about Kurtz
being seriously ill and believes that the manager and others at
the Central Station are planning to deny him supplies and
medicine in the hope that he will die.

Marlow thinks of Kurtz as an idealist with higher and nobler

motives than his fellow traders and cannot wait to meet him.
He is also convinced that his departure from the Central
Station is being deliberately delayed.

He finally sets off on the eight-week journey upriver to find

Kurtz after frustrating months of repairs to the steamboat. As
the boat draws near to the Inner Station it is attacked by
tribesmen and the helmsman is killed. Marlow meets a half-
mad young Russian when he arrives who tells him of Kurtz’s
brilliance and the semi-divine power he wields over the
natives. However, Marlow soon realizes that Kurtz has
achieved his status by indulging in barbaric rites. He is now
dying.

Kurtz tries to justify his actions as Marlow attempts to move

him back downriver. Before dying, he utters his famous and
cryptic last words: "The horror! The horror!” Marlow has a
breakdown and remembers little of his journey home After
Kurtz’s death. He visits Kurtz’s fiancée in Brussels a year
later. Faced with her grief he cannot bring himself to tell her
the truth.

THE END…