“Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad

Summary

Heart of Darkness centers around Marlow, an introspective sailor, and his journey

up the Congo River to meet Kurtz, reputed to be an idealistic man of great abilities.

Marlow takes a job as a riverboat captain with the Company, a Belgian concern

organized to trade in the Congo. As he travels to Africa and then up the Congo,

Marlow encounters widespread inefficiency and brutality in the Company’s

stations. The native inhabitants of the region have been forced into the Company’s

service, and they suffer terribly from overwork and ill treatment at the hands of the

Company’s agents. The cruelty and squalor of imperial enterprise contrasts

sharply with the impassive and majestic jungle that surrounds the white man’s

settlements, making them appear to be tiny islands amidst a vast darkness.

Marlow arrives at the Central Station, run by the general manager, an

unwholesome, conspiratorial character. He finds that his steamship has been sunk

and spends several months waiting for parts to repair it. His interest in Kurtz grows

during this period. The manager and his favorite, the brick maker, seem to fear

Kurtz as a threat to their position. Kurtz is rumored to be ill, making the delays in

repairing the ship all the more costly. Marlow eventually gets the parts he needs

to repair his ship, and he and the manager set out with a few agents (whom Marlow

calls pilgrims because of their strange habit of carrying long, wooden staves

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wherever they go) and a crew of cannibals on a long, difficult voyage up the river.

The dense jungle and the oppressive silence make everyone aboard a little jumpy,

and the occasional glimpse of a native village or the sound of drums works the

pilgrims into a frenzy.

Marlow and his crew come across a hut with stacked firewood, together with a note

saying that the wood is for them but that they should approach cautiously. Shortly

after the steamer has taken on the firewood, it is surrounded by a dense fog. When

the fog clears, the ship is attacked by an unseen band of natives, who fire arrows

from the safety of the forest. The African helmsman is killed before Marlow

frightens the natives away with the ship’s steam whistle. Not long after, Marlow

and his companions arrive at Kurtz’s Inner Station, expecting to find him dead, but

a half-crazed Russian trader, who meets them as they come ashore, assures them

that everything is fine and informs them that he is the one who left the wood. The

Russian claims that Kurtz has enlarged his mind and cannot be subjected to the

same moral judgments as normal people. Apparently, Kurtz has established

himself as a god with the natives and has gone on brutal raids in the surrounding

territory in search of ivory. The collection of severed heads adorning the fence

posts around the station attests to his “methods.” The pilgrims bring Kurtz out of

the station-house on a stretcher, and a large group of native warriors pours out of

the forest and surrounds them. Kurtz speaks to them, and the natives disappear

into the woods.

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The manager brings Kurtz, who is quite ill, aboard the steamer. A beautiful native

woman, apparently Kurtz’s mistress, appears on the shore and stares out at the

ship. The Russian implies that she is somehow involved with Kurtz and has caused

trouble before through her influence over him. The Russian reveals to Marlow, after

swearing him to secrecy, that Kurtz had ordered the attack on the steamer to make

them believe he was dead in order that they might turn back and leave him to his

plans. The Russian then leaves by canoe, fearing the displeasure of the manager.

Kurtz disappears in the night, and Marlow goes out in search of him, finding him

crawling on all fours toward the native camp. Marlow stops him and convinces him

to return to the ship. They set off down the river the next morning, but Kurtz’s health

is failing fast.

Marlow listens to Kurtz talk while he pilots the ship, and Kurtz entrusts Marlow with

a packet of personal documents, including an eloquent pamphlet on civilizing the

savages which ends with a scrawled message that says, “Exterminate all the

brutes!” The steamer breaks down, and they have to stop for repairs. Kurtz dies,

uttering his last words—“The horror! The horror!”—in the presence of the confused

Marlow. Marlow falls ill soon after and barely survives. Eventually he returns to

Europe and goes to see Kurtz’s Intended (his fiancée). She is still in mourning,

even though it has been over a year since Kurtz’s death, and she praises him as

a paragon of virtue and achievement. She asks what his last words were, but

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Marlow cannot bring himself to shatter her illusions with the truth. Instead, he tells

her that Kurtz’s last word was her name.

“A Passage to India” by E.M Foster

Summary

Two Englishwomen, the young Miss Adela Quested and the elderly Mrs. Moore,

travel to India. Adela expects to become engaged to Mrs. Moore’s son, Ronny, a

British magistrate in the Indian city of Chandrapore. Adela and Mrs. Moore each

hope to see the real India during their visit, rather than cultural institutions imported

by the British.

At the same time, Aziz, a young Muslim doctor in India, is increasingly frustrated

by the poor treatment he receives at the hands of the English. Aziz is especially

annoyed with Major Callendar, the civil surgeon, who has a tendency to summon

Aziz for frivolous reasons in the middle of dinner. Aziz and two of his educated

friends, Hamidullah and Mahmoud Ali, hold a lively conversation about whether or

not an Indian can be friends with an Englishman in India. That night, Mrs. Moore

and Aziz happen to run into each other while exploring a local mosque, and the

two become friendly. Aziz is moved and surprised that an English person would

treat him like a friend.

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Mr. Turton, the collector who governs Chandrapore, hosts a party so that Adela

and Mrs. Moore may have the opportunity to meet some of the more prominent

and wealthy Indians in the city. At the event, which proves to be rather awkward,

Adela meets Cyril Fielding, the principal of the government college in

Chandrapore. Fielding, impressed with Adela’s open friendliness to the Indians,

invites her and Mrs. Moore to tea with him and the Hindu professor Godbole. At

Adela’s request, Fielding invites Aziz to tea as well.

At the tea, Aziz and Fielding immediately become friendly, and the afternoon is

overwhelmingly pleasant until Ronny Heaslop arrives and rudely interrupts the

party. Later that evening, Adela tells Ronny that she has decided not to marry him.

But that night, the two are in a car accident together, and the excitement of the

event causes Adela to change her mind about the marriage.

Not long afterward, Aziz organizes an expedition to the nearby Marabar Caves for

those who attended Fielding’s tea. Fielding and Professor Godbole miss the train

to Marabar, so Aziz continues on alone with the two ladies, Adela and Mrs. Moore.

Inside one of the caves, Mrs. Moore is unnerved by the enclosed space, which is

crowded with Aziz’s retinue, and by the uncanny echo that seems to translate

every sound she makes into the noise “boum.”

Aziz, Adela, and a guide go on to the higher caves while Mrs. Moore waits below.

Adela, suddenly realizing that she does not love Ronny, asks Aziz whether he has

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more than one wife—a question he considers offensive. Aziz storms off into a cave,

and when he returns, Adela is gone. Aziz scolds the guide for losing Adela, and

the guide runs away. Aziz finds Adela’s broken field-glasses and heads down the

hill. Back at the picnic site, Aziz finds Fielding waiting for him. Aziz is unconcerned

to learn that Adela has hastily taken a car back to Chandrapore, as he is overjoyed

to see Fielding. Back in Chandrapore, however, Aziz is unexpectedly arrested. He

is charged with attempting to rape Adela Quested while she was in the caves, a

charge based on a claim Adela herself has made.

Fielding, believing Aziz to be innocent, angers all of British India by joining the

Indians in Aziz’s defense. In the weeks before the trial, the racial tensions between

the Indians and the English flare up considerably. Mrs. Moore is distracted and

miserable because of her memory of the echo in the cave and because of her

impatience with the upcoming trial. Adela is emotional and ill; she too seems to

suffer from an echo in her mind. Ronny is fed up with Mrs. Moore’s lack of support

for Adela, and it is agreed that Mrs. Moore will return to England earlier than

planned. Mrs. Moore dies on the voyage back to England, but not before she

realizes that there is no “real India”—but rather a complex multitude of different

Indias.

At Aziz’s trial, Adela, under oath, is questioned about what happened in the caves.

Shockingly, she declares that she has made a mistake: Aziz is not the person or

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thing that attacked her in the cave. Aziz is set free, and Fielding escorts Adela to

the Government College, where she spends the next several weeks. Fielding

begins to respect Adela, recognizing her bravery in standing against her peers to

pronounce Aziz innocent. Ronny breaks off his engagement to Adela, and she

returns to England.

Aziz, however, is angry that Fielding would befriend Adela after she nearly ruined

Aziz’s life, and the friendship between the two men suffers as a consequence.

Then Fielding sails for a visit to England. Aziz declares that he is done with the

English and that he intends to move to a place where he will not have to encounter

them.

Two years later, Aziz has become the chief doctor to the Rajah of Mau, a Hindu

region several hundred miles from Chandrapore. He has heard that Fielding

married Adela shortly after returning to England. Aziz now virulently hates all

English people. One day, walking through an old temple with his three children, he

encounters Fielding and his brother-in-law. Aziz is surprised to learn that the

brother-in-law’s name is Ralph Moore; it turns out that Fielding married not Adela

Quested, but Stella Moore, Mrs. Moore’s daughter from her second marriage.

Aziz befriends Ralph. After he accidentally runs his rowboat into Fielding’s, Aziz

renews his friendship with Fielding as well. The two men go for a final ride together

before Fielding leaves, during which Aziz tells Fielding that once the English are

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out of India, the two will be able to be friends. Fielding asks why they cannot be

friends now, when they both want to be, but the sky and the earth seem to say “No,

not yet. . . . No, not there.”

“To the Lighthouse” by Virginia Wolf

Summary

To the Lighthouse is divided into three sections: “The Window,” “Time Passes,”

and “The Lighthouse.” Each section is fragmented into stream-of-consciousness

contributions from various narrators.

“The Window” opens just before the start of World War I. Mr. Ramsay and Mrs.

Ramsay bring their eight children to their summer home in the Hebrides (a group

of islands west of Scotland). Across the bay from their house stands a large

lighthouse. Six-year-old James Ramsay wants desperately to go to the lighthouse,

and Mrs. Ramsay tells him that they will go the next day if the weather permits.

James reacts gleefully, but Mr. Ramsay tells him coldly that the weather looks to

be foul. James resents his father and believes that he enjoys being cruel to James

and his siblings.

The Ramsays host a number of guests, including the dour Charles Tansley, who

admires Mr. Ramsay’s work as a metaphysical philosopher. Also at the house is

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Lily Briscoe, a young painter who begins a portrait of Mrs. Ramsay. Mrs. Ramsay

wants Lily to marry William Bankes, an old friend of the Ramsays, but Lily resolves

to remain single. Mrs. Ramsay does manage to arrange another marriage,

however, between Paul Rayley and Minta Doyle, two of their acquaintances.

During the course of the afternoon, Paul proposes to Minta, Lily begins her

painting, Mrs. Ramsay soothes the resentful James, and Mr. Ramsay frets over

his shortcomings as a philosopher, periodically turning to Mrs. Ramsay for comfort.

That evening, the Ramsays host a seemingly ill-fated dinner party. Paul and Minta

are late returning from their walk on the beach with two of the Ramsays’ children.

Lily bristles at outspoken comments made by Charles Tansley, who suggests that

women can neither paint nor write. Mr. Ramsay reacts rudely when Augustus

Carmichael, a poet, asks for a second plate of soup. As the night draws on,

however, these missteps right themselves, and the guests come together to make

a memorable evening.

The joy, however, like the party itself, cannot last, and as Mrs. Ramsay leaves her

guests in the dining room, she reflects that the event has already slipped into the

past. Later, she joins her husband in the parlor. The couple sits quietly together,

until Mr. Ramsay’s characteristic insecurities interrupt their peace. He wants his

wife to tell him that she loves him. Mrs. Ramsay is not one to make such

pronouncements, but she concedes to his point made earlier in the day that the

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weather will be too rough for a trip to the lighthouse the next day. Mr. Ramsay thus

knows that Mrs. Ramsay loves him. Night falls, and one night quickly becomes

another.

“Lord of Flies” by William Golding

Summary

In the midst of a raging war, a plane evacuating a group of schoolboys from Britain

is shot down over a deserted tropical island. Two of the boys, Ralph and Piggy,

discover a conch shell on the beach, and Piggy realizes it could be used as a horn

to summon the other boys. Once assembled, the boys set about electing a leader

and devising a way to be rescued. They choose Ralph as their leader, and Ralph

appoints another boy, Jack, to be in charge of the boys who will hunt food for the

entire group.

Ralph, Jack, and another boy, Simon, set off on an expedition to explore the island.

When they return, Ralph declares that they must light a signal fire to attract the

attention of passing ships. The boys succeed in igniting some dead wood by

focusing sunlight through the lenses of Piggy’s eyeglasses. However, the boys pay

more attention to playing than to monitoring the fire, and the flames quickly engulf

the forest. A large swath of dead wood burns out of control, and one of the

youngest boys in the group disappears, presumably having burned to death.

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At first, the boys enjoy their life without grown-ups and spend much of their time

splashing in the water and playing games. Ralph, however, complains that they

should be maintaining the signal fire and building huts for shelter. The hunters fail

in their attempt to catch a wild pig, but their leader, Jack, becomes increasingly

preoccupied with the act of hunting.

When a ship passes by on the horizon one day, Ralph and Piggy notice, to their

horror, that the signal fire—which had been the hunters’ responsibility to

maintain—has burned out. Furious, Ralph accosts Jack, but the hunter has just

returned with his first kill, and all the hunters seem gripped with a strange frenzy,

reenacting the chase in a kind of wild dance. Piggy criticizes Jack, who hits Piggy

across the face. Ralph blows the conch shell and reprimands the boys in a speech

intended to restore order. At the meeting, it quickly becomes clear that some of the

boys have started to become afraid. The littlest boys, known as “littluns,” have

been troubled by nightmares from the beginning, and more and more boys now

believe that there is some sort of beast or monster lurking on the island. The older

boys try to convince the others at the meeting to think rationally, asking where such

a monster could possibly hide during the daytime. One of the littluns suggests that

it hides in the sea—a proposition that terrifies the entire group.

Not long after the meeting, some military planes engage in a battle high above the

island. The boys, asleep below, do not notice the flashing lights and explosions in

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the clouds. A parachutist drifts to earth on the signal-fire mountain, dead. Sam and

Eric, the twins responsible for watching the fire at night, are asleep and do not see

the parachutist land. When the twins wake up, they see the enormous silhouette

of his parachute and hear the strange flapping noises it makes. Thinking the island

beast is at hand, they rush back to the camp in terror and report that the beast has

attacked them.

The boys organize a hunting expedition to search for the monster. Jack and Ralph,

who are increasingly at odds, travel up the mountain. They see the silhouette of

the parachute from a distance and think that it looks like a huge, deformed ape.

The group holds a meeting at which Jack and Ralph tell the others of the sighting.

Jack says that Ralph is a coward and that he should be removed from office, but

the other boys refuse to vote Ralph out of power. Jack angrily runs away down the

beach, calling all the hunters to join him. Ralph rallies the remaining boys to build

a new signal fire, this time on the beach rather than on the mountain. They obey,

but before they have finished the task, most of them have slipped away to join

Jack.

Jack declares himself the leader of the new tribe of hunters and organizes a hunt

and a violent, ritual slaughter of a sow to solemnize the occasion. The hunters then

decapitate the sow and place its head on a sharpened stake in the jungle as an

offering to the beast. Later, encountering the bloody, fly-covered head, Simon has

a terrible vision, during which it seems to him that the head is speaking. The voice,

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which he imagines as belonging to the Lord of the Flies, says that Simon will never

escape him, for he exists within all men. Simon faints. When he wakes up, he goes

to the mountain, where he sees the dead parachutist. Understanding then that the

beast does not exist externally but rather within each individual boy, Simon travels

to the beach to tell the others what he has seen. But the others are in the midst of

a chaotic revelry—even Ralph and Piggy have joined Jack’s feast—and when they

see Simon’s shadowy figure emerge from the jungle, they fall upon him and kill

him with their bare hands and teeth.

The following morning, Ralph and Piggy discuss what they have done. Jack’s

hunters attack them and their few followers and steal Piggy’s glasses in the

process. Ralph’s group travels to Jack’s stronghold in an attempt to make Jack

see reason, but Jack orders Sam and Eric tied up and fights with Ralph. In the

ensuing battle, one boy, Roger, rolls a boulder down the mountain, killing Piggy

and shattering the conch shell. Ralph barely manages to escape a torrent of

spears.

Ralph hides for the rest of the night and the following day, while the others hunt

him like an animal. Jack has the other boys ignite the forest in order to smoke

Ralph out of his hiding place. Ralph stays in the forest, where he discovers and

destroys the sow’s head, but eventually, he is forced out onto the beach, where he

knows the other boys will soon arrive to kill him. Ralph collapses in exhaustion, but

when he looks up, he sees a British naval officer standing over him. The officer’s

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ship noticed the fire raging in the jungle. The other boys reach the beach and stop

in their tracks at the sight of the officer. Amazed at the spectacle of this group of

bloodthirsty, savage children, the officer asks Ralph to explain. Ralph is

overwhelmed by the knowledge that he is safe but, thinking about what has

happened on the island, he begins to weep. The other boys begin to sob as well.

The officer turns his back so that the boys may regain their composure.

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