Scarica Joseph Conrad e Heart of Darkness e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! JOSEPH CONRAD (1857-1924) He was born in Ukraine in 1857 and his father was a patriot and a man of letter who was exiles to Russia because of his political activities. When both his parents died, he was brought up by a maternal uncle. In 1874 he joined a French ship carrying guns to Spain, and in 1878 he signed on with an English ship and learned the language during his travels. He sailed to East Asia, Australia, India, South America and Africa and in 1886 he became a British citizen. He started to turn his experiences into fiction (Almayer’s Folly in 1895) and he decided to embark on a career as a writer. In 1890 he went up the River Congo on a small steamboat, the trip affected his health and inspired his novel Heart of Darkness (1902). In 1896 he settled down to professional writing and married an Englishwoman. He died in 1924 in Southern England. He did not write traditional Victorian adventure stories, but was inspired by the exotic places and dangers he encountered. He used these settings where a complex mental state could be presented in a moment of crisis, as geographical isolation was a symbol of psychological isolation. His characters are weighed down by past sins and faults. He saw the workings of European colonial empires and was critical of the ruthless exploitation of both natural resources and native labour force. However he did not have faith in political change or in the good nature of humans. His fiction shows the lack of understanding and communication between Europeans and non-Europeans. He was attacked as anti- imperialist and as racist by writers from the ex-colonies after the Second World War (Chinua Achebe). He thinks that the individual is alone and at the moment of crisis cannot rely on social institutions or moral codes, this tests the man’s integrity. All his stories contain a deep pessimism and he uses the double character to highlight this ambiguity. His works stand on the dividing line between the traditional and the modern novel, later artist used the alienation of the characters and their inability to communicate. Narrative frames, flashbacks and flash-forwards, fragment prospectives were also used by later novelists. There is no all-knowing external narrator but he shows the reality of each person’s individual consciousness. HEART OF DARKNESS (1902)—> long short story or novella based on personal experience, when he discovered the nature of his own personality and came to the pessimistic conclusione about the nature of civilized man. The darkness is the impenetrable mystery that lie at the centre of human nature and the voyage is a voyage of discovery into the self. Mr. Kurtz is the personification of the identification of colonization and savagery. The story expose the hypocrisy and cruelty of the colonization. Most of the story is narrated in first person by Marlow, but it is begun and ended by an external voice (continuous refraction of the point of view). The story starts and ends on the River Thames that is linked to the River Congo by the same darkness that is present in all human beings.
