conrad + heart of darkness, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica conrad + heart of darkness e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! Joseph Conrad He was born in Poland in 1857 and his parents belonged to the Polish nobility. His father was a poet and an ardent Polish patriot and as a result his family was forced into exile inRussia, where he learnt Russian. His parents died when he was 12 and he was sent to France, where hewas brought up by one of his uncles. He learnt French as well, becoming a polyglot. In 1874 left for Marseilles to go to sea and in 1878 he joined an English ship to the Far East and Australia. Sea was really important to him and it has a symbolic meaning in his novels. In 1886 studied English for his Master Mariner qualification and in the same year he became a British citizen. His English is very accurate also because it is the result of hard study. In 189O he went to the River Congo, where he witnessed the brutalities of colonial exploitation, which obsessed him for the rest of his life. FromCongo, he drew inspiration to write “Heart of Darkness”. After the success of his first novel, between 1892 and 1893 he devoted himself to writing. He published his works serially and in book form. (1897 The Nigger of the Narcissus, 19OO Lord Jim, 19O2 Heart of Darkness, 19O4Nostromo, 19O7 The Secret Agent, 1917 The Shadow Line). He died in 1924. In the preface to the Nigger of the Narcissus, Conrad exposed the writer’s task. According to him, the writer should not try to amuse nor to teach, yet to record the complexity of life and explore the meaning of the human situation. - The setting of his novels usually is the Belgian Congo or the China Seas and he describes the sea and the life on ships, seen asmicrocosm in their isolation. - His characters are men, described in how they react in exceptional circumstances and extreme situations. The characters’ values and qualities are tested in a moment of crisis and prove to be inadequate, no answer can be found in their moral values. He wrote adventure stories but he is an exotic novelist at the same time, because he described exotic places. On top of that, he is placed between the traditional and themodernist novel, because together with the loneliness and reliance on social institutions, his novels represent a test of man’s integrity. In his novels, the Individual consciousness reflects a sense of evil against virtues that seem powerless. There is a contrast between personal feelings and professional duties, there’s no confidence but a wild and hostile background. In Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness and other stories, Conrad used a fictional sailor and narrator, Marlow, as a framing device. His stories of maritime, colonialist adventure present philosophical depth in their reflections on truth and falsehood, and often represent a single human being confronted with the need to make important decisions after traditional values have collapsed. His use of multiple narrators and points of view constantly reflected the complexity of human experience and the difficulty of judgingmen's actions. As a novelist Conrad has been praised for his experimentations and his penetrating analysis of colonialism, but one of his greatest novels, Heart of Darkness, has also been criticized for reflecting the dominant image of Africa in the western imagination (by Chinua Achebe among others). Conrad had an influence on many writers of the 2Oth century and his works have been adapted in numerous cinematographic versions. 13 Heart of Darkness (19O2) Heart of Darkness is the story of a nightmarish journey into the heart of Africa told by a sailor named Marlow. The novel opens in London, at the mouth of the river Thames, where Marlow starts telling the other men on the boat about the time he spent in the Belgian Congo in search of a man called Kurtz, who ran the Belgian Company's station in the jungle. The journey is an occasion forMarlow to see the brutality of European imperialism in Africa: the natives are treated very cruelly by the Europeans, who order them to do meaningless things and keep them in terrible conditions of slavery. When Marlow reaches Kurtz he discovers he is seriously ill, but does not want to go back to Europe to be cured.Marlow realizes that Kurtz is worshiped by the natives and has become a cannibal. He eventually succeeds in convincing Kurtz to return to the ship, but he is too weak to endure the journey and dies. Kurtz's last words, “The Horror! The Horror!” are taken by Marlow as Kurtz's final judgment on himself, on his actions and, more generally, on European imperialism. It is a long short story or novella, based on personal experience, since in 189O Conrad sailed up the River Congo on a small steamer and discovered the nature of his own personality. After this journey, he developed a pessimistic conclusion about the nature of civilizedman. The title of the novel itself is suggestive: Africa is referred to as the Dark Continent, which symbolizes the impenetrable mystery of human personality. This voyage can be seen not only as a geographical voyage of discovery into the unknown continent but also as a voyage of discovery into the self. Here, the white man reverts to his true self: savage and instinctive rather than rational, more savage and cruel. Themain themes of the novel are: ✧ racism ✧ greed and Imperialism ✧ hypocrisy and Indifference ✧ a quest for the self ✧ reality is each person’s individual consciousness ✧ the theme of the double Conrad's novel is first of all a crude representation of the utter brutality of European colonization in Africa. Set in the Belgian Congo, the novel depicts the monstrosity and cruelty of the colonizers, who exploit the African natives and hypocritically justify colonial exploitation with the idea of bringing civilization to the savages. Conrad's novel makes it very clear that colonization has a double effect: it affects both the natives who are enslaved and dehumanized by the colonizers, and the colonizers, whose souls are corrupted by vice and by the desire to use their power to subjugate the others. Africa as an immense source of profit. Mr Kurtz , who has reverted to savage rites and rituals not only to control black people under his command but also to satisfy his most basic physical appetites. In onewriting sent to the Company Kurtz justifies colonialism in terms of the idea of the ennobling mission of the Europeans, but his high idealism is betrayed by a note at the foot of the paragraph, in which he orders to exterminate all the brutes. This exposes the hypocrisy and cruelty of the colonization of Africa and as a matter of fact Kurtz represents the dark personification of degenerate idealism. Conrad represents European civilisation as innerly corrupt and hopelessly damned. European cities, for instance, whose wealth depends on the exploitation of colonial countries, are described by Conrad as 'sepulchral cities' and their inhabitants as hollow men. For Conrad the light of European civilisation hides the 'darkness' of corruption and the death of any moral value, Marlow's quest for Kurtz thus leads him to discover the intrinsic hollowness and falsity of the European tales of civilisation and progress. Unlike Kipling, who in his poem The White Man's Burden justifies colonialism by underlining the duty developed 14