BOOK REVIEW

Your name: Chupryna Halyna

Title of book:Heart of darkness

Author:Conrad
Number of pages:188
Date started:15.11.2021
Date finished:09.01.2022

The novel tells the story of an Englishman Marlowe, whose Belgian trading
company is located in Africa, where he becomes
captain of a river steamer. Marlowe has an important task - to bring Kurtz, an ivory
miner, back to civilization.

The main part is Marlow's first-person account of his journey along a tropical river,
among the completely unknown
European territories. His story is full of eerie details about the lives of judges and
descriptions of the established order in a
distant colony.

The expression "heart of darkness" shows not only the geographical location of the
"black continent", where the foot of
civilization has not yet set foot, but also the "darkness in the soul" of man

Is the book easy or difficult to understand? Do you like the pictures? Are these
helpful? Do you like this
book? Why? Which parts/characters do you like best? Do you think the book has a
message? What do
you think that message is?
 Heart of Darkness is a subtle novel that coldly dissects the darkest depths of
human nature. Marlowe, the sailor storyteller, told us the story of his journey into
the heart of Africa, where he met the natives and Kurz, an ivory
company agent and a highly revered white man. “Wild Wilderness has brutally
avenged Kurtz for the fanatical invasion. I think she whispered to him about him
that he did not know, and this whisper enchanted him and echoed in him with a
booming echo, for there was emptiness in his depths. "
It's amazing how Konrad managed to create such an ambiguous and deep story in
such a small volume. It touches on imperialism, racism against indigenous
peoples, cultural clashes, the savagery of the jungle, and how power and greed can
corrupt. And also to put the hero in such situations and gives him just an
impossible choice. At some point, I think we all are faced with similar solutions,
perhaps not so difficult. Can a person be good ... but do evil? Can a good person
really become flawed ... or has he always been flawed?

Where and when does the story start? Who are the main characters? What sort of
story is it? What
happens in the first part of the story?

Heart of Darkness begins on board the Nellie, a small ship moored on the
Thames River in London. After describing the river and its slow-moving traffic,
the unnamed narrator offers short descriptions of London's history to his
companions who, with him, lazily lounge on the deck, waiting for the tide to turn.
With him are the Director of
Companies (their Captain), a lawyer, an accountant, and Marlow, the novel's
protagonist. As the sun sets, the four men become contemplative and brooding;
eventually, Marlow breaks the spell of silence by beginning his tale about his
voyage to the Congo.
The other men remain silent while Marlow collects his ideas, after which he
begins the story proper. The
remainder of the novel becomes (with a few exceptions) the narrator's report of
what Marlow tells him and the others on board the Nellie. Conrad's novel is thus a
frame story, or story-within-a-story.
 As a boy, Marlow was fascinated by maps and yearned to become a seaman or
explorer who could visit the most remote parts of the earth. As a young man,
Marlow spent approximately six years sailing in the Pacific before returning to
London — where he then saw, in a shop window, a map of Africa and the Congo
River. Recalling the news of a Continental trading Company operating in the
Congo, Marlow became determined to pilot a steamboat to find adventure in
Africa. He asked his aunt, who knew the wife of a Company official to assist him
in getting a job as a pilot; she happily complied.

Marlow hurried across the English Channel to sign his contracts at the Company's
headquarters in Brussels.
Passing through an office with two women who are knitting, Marlow spoke with
the Company's director for less than a minute; after being dismissed, he was asked
to sign a number of papers in which he promised not to divulge any trade secrets.
Marlow finally reached the mouth of the Congo. Finding passage on a little sea-
bound steamer to take him where his steamboat awaited him, Marlow spoke with
its Swedish captain about the Company and the effects of the jungle on Europeans.
The Swede then told Marlow a short yet ominous story about a man he took
upriver who hanged himself on the road. Shocked, Marlow asked why, only to be
told that perhaps the "sun" or the "country" were too much for him. Eventually,
they reached the Company's Outer Station, which amounted to three wooden
buildings on the side of a rocky slope. Out of this station was shipped the
Company's most important and
lucrative commodity: ivory.
How do you feel about the first part of the story? Is it interesting? Do you like the
characters?
So this is an interesting beginning .I like it

What happens in this part of the story? Has the setting changed? Have new
characters been
introduced? Have some characters become more important or less important? What
do you feel about
the events which have happened?
Part 2 of Heart of Darkness offers the reader some of Conrad's most dense
passages. Sentences such as "It
was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention"
may seem confusing, but the difficulty here instead is Marlow's, because much of
Heart of Darkness concerns how its protagonist struggles to articulate what
traveling through the jungle is like. Marlow explains to his companions on the
Nellie that they
cannot fully grasp the whole truth of what he saw, because they live in the modern,
"civilized" world with "a butcher round one corner, a policeman round another,
excellent appetites, and temperature normal." Marlow's point here is that language
sometimes fails to wholly convey the wonders and horrors of his experience; his
remark, "This is the worst of trying to tell," suggests his difficulty in relating to his
companions the full emotional, spiritual, and political impact that his journey had
on him. His companions will not be able to fully understand him because they live
with the "solid pavement" of Europe under their feet. This idea that Marlow's
telling of the story is a major part of the story itself as suggested by the anonymous
narrator who, at the beginning of the novel, explains that, for Marlow, "the
meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale
which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze." In other words, Heart of
Darkness is as much the story of a man coming face-to-face with a number of
political, moral, and spiritual horrors as much as it is one of that same man's search
for language adequate enough to convey them. Hence, the novel is by turns both
striking and obtuse, both concrete and abstract, both detailed and ambiguous.