Imagery

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness centers itself around its multiloquentprotagonist, Charlie Marlow, an unreliable narrator whose interpretation ofevents is often open to question. Conrad forces the reader to take an activerole in his somewhat choppy very ambiguous novella, through painfullyextensive details and very vivid imagery to perhaps vicariously throughMarlow, gain a better understanding of its events and of the overall themein this novella, restraint and reason. By no means was this intended to be asugar coated, stick to the plot, happy ending type novel. The title of thebook even premeditates one of the lack of clarity, Heart of Darkness, whichis just as ambiguous as its entire novella. Heart of Darkness is JosephConrad's tale of one man's journey, both mental and physical, into thedepths of the wild African jungle and into the human soul. The seaman,Marlow, tells his crew an eye opening very detailed tale of a man namedKurtz and his excursion which all culminates in his encounter with thesupposed savior Kurtz, and inevitably his very demise. The novel itself iscomposed Marlow's two opposing points of view: naive Marlow, which comesbefore Marlow's eventual epiphany after having met Kurtz, and the maturedperspective he takes on after all of the events leading up to his andKurtz's encounter. Yet really what allured me into reading this book was theimagery, true one can complain that the novel really has no real plot ordirection but the imagery with each passing page jumped the reader intodifferent locations and made you feel as well as see what was going on,which made up for the choppy storyline.The use of imagery and metaphor to illustrate to the reader the contrastbetween light and dark was brilliant by Conrad. Imagery itself is a majorliterary element found any book but its one the few positive attributes ofthis novella. Conrad use of Imagery can be noted as soon as you beginreading the story as know because it immediately starts out with thesecondary narrator describing our protagonists surrounding, such as, "A hazerested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The airwas dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into amournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, andtown on earth". With this quote alone, you can envision the dark very grungysetting the story first takes place. The use of imagery is the only thingworth actual reading, never has a book captivated me with only details.Marlow himself uses imagery a lot throughout the novella, for example what Ifound most visual was his description of the African Americans: ““A lot ofpeople, mostly black and naked, moved about like ants”. I don’t really knowif its crude humor but I found that amusing but again Conrad more then wellmade up for his lack of story with rich and detailed imagery.
posted by Oscar P.