Scarica Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness e più Temi in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! JOSEPH CONRAD (1857-1924) Joseph Conrad was born in Ukraine; his father was a patriot and a man of letter who was later exiled to Russia. Both parents had died by the time Conrad was twelve, and he was brought up by a maternal uncle, mostly in France. Young Conrad’s dream was to go to the sea. He was finally to go to Marseilles in 1874, where he joined a French ship. Then Conrad joined an English merchant ship. He started to learn the language, which was his third after Polish and French. After serving on a number of British ships, he became a British citizen. His first command came in 1888, and in 1890 he went up the River Congo. That trip left impressions that obsessed him for the rest of his life and which he later worked into Heart of Darkness. Conrad died in 1924 in southern England, where he had retired. HEART OF DARKNESS (1902) Heart of Darkness, possibly Conrad’s most famous work of fiction, is a long short story, or novella, based on personal experience. Eager to penetrate the blank space that represented Africa, Conrad sailed up the River Congo. In doing so he discovered the nature of his own personality and came to pessimistic conclusion about the nature of the ‘civilized’ man. Starting from a few notes he had taken during the actual trip, he later wrote Heart of Darkness. The use of the double: Conrad often makes use of a 'double character. Unlike Stevenson, who in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde splits one personality into two, Conrad puts two characters alongside each other: one of them, like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, represents the dark, or unconscious side of the other - what he might have become under different circumstances. ❖ The story: Marlow, the narrator, tells his story to some friends on a boat anchored on the River Thames. Years before, Marlow had been hired by a belgian trading company to sail up the River Congo and fetch a man named Kurtz, an official of the Company who had been their best agent but now seemed to have gone insane. Marlow's trip on a steamboat up the River Congo brings him into close contact with both the brutal exploitation of the natives by the ivory merchants and the legend of Kurtz. When Marlow finally reaches Kurtz, he finds a dying man who has become an idol for the natives, performing strange savage rites. Marlow is fascinated by Kurtz: by the depths to which his soul has fallen and also by his courage. He is disgusted, on the other hand, by the other colonists' hypocrisy: the men who had worshipped Kurtz now only want to get rid of him. Kurtz's unforgivable sin, in their eyes, is to have exposed colonization for what it really is: a brutal, material business. In the end Marlow resumes his journey down the River Congo towards the ocean, and then back to Europe. The same boat also carries Kurtz - who is lying in one of the cabins, slowly dying. Back in Brussels, Marlow goes to see Kurtz's fiancée. She believes in the rhetoric of the civilizing mission of the white man, and regards Kurtz as a God-sent angel. Marlow lies to her, saying that Kurtz's last words were her name, while in fact they were, "The horror! The horror!" These words sum up the life Kurtz had lived and seen.
