QUICK ANALYSIS

             Heart of Darkness (1899) is a novella by Polish-English novelist Joseph Conrad. It is an example of colonial literature, being written at the very end of the 19th century when the European powers were in Africa. It tells the story of Charles Marlow, a sailor who takes on an assignment from a Belgian trading company as a ferry-boat captain in the African jungle in search of a Captain Kurtz.

            The depiction of Africa and the natives are often dark, savage, and wild. Although the book condemns and criticizes European colonialism, portraying it as violent and oppressive, it still does little to humanize the indigineous people.

            To read a postcolonial criticism in the New York Times about the racism of Heart of Darkness, click here.

FROM THE TEXT

IDENTIFY THE CHOICE TYPE

(e.g. metaphor, consonance, oxymoron, lexical choice, etc.)

ANALYZE IT!

You might wish to use these slides to help you with your language.

Also, don’t forget that you can use the website for info on how to analyze certain devices, like alliteration for instance.

[About the African Setting] “The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil water-way leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky–seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.”

Alliteration /b/

Visual Imagery & Pathetic Fallacy, as well as

Juxtaposition

Metaphor

• The alliteration of the plosive /b/ evokes ideas of power due to its explosive sound, possibly linking the clouds to thunderclouds.

• The visual imagery of the black clouds imply darkness, literal and figurative. Through pathetic fallacy, the dark, intense mood is emphasized.
• In addition, the clouds and sky juxtapose the tranquil waters, foreshadowing danger to come. Black/darkness is seen as evil in contrast to calm clarity of the men on the water.

• The jungle is compared to a heart of darkness, implying it is evil; In fact, the name has two meanings: firstly, the literal meaning is the jungle at the center of Africa in the Congo, and the other is figurative meaning which is the primeval, savage nature of mankind.

[About an African native] “I saw him open his mouth wide. . . as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him.”

Hyperbole

Asyndeton

• The simile magnifies the man’s action, making him seem inhuman, as though he wished to consume everything in an uncivilized manner.

• The asyndeton emphasizes the ways the man could consumer the world with such a wide mouth, as it is as though the conjunctions have similarly been swallowed.

[As they go deeper into the jungle] “All that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men.”

Asyndeton

Lexical Choices

• The asyndeton implies, as they go deeper into the jungle, that the setting is becoming less civilized by removing language from the sentences.

• “Wild men” evokes images of savages; “mysterious” and “wilderness” in addition to this, create a semantic field of strange lands which need to be explored.

“the earth seem[ed] unearthly. [Europeans] were accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there– there you could look at a thing monstrous, beautiful, and free.”

Paradox

Metaphor

Object pronoun (Lexical Choice)

Paradox

• The use of paradox (“the earth seem[ed] unearthly”) hints that this new land is like a completely new planet; it contrasts the normative (Western) world he knew.

• Suggests that Africans are beasts/not human. (Obviously very racist!)

• In addition to “monster” calling natives “a thing” dehumanizes them

• Another paradox in “monstrous, beautiful” native; duality of the colonizer = emphasizes ambivalence.

[Of an African native working on a machine], "He was an improved specimen; he could fire up a vertical boiler. He was there below me, and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat, walking on his hind legs."

Lexical choice

Possible metaphor

Analogy (if you said simile, this is acceptable)

• “Specimen” evokes images of animals in the discipline of science, not of humans. The term dehumanizes them.

• “Below” could be read literally, or figuratively to imply that the natives are lower in the social hierarchy.

• Image of a native with mechanical and industrial talents is compared to a humorous image of a dog wearing clothes standing on two legs; thus, it hints that such a notion is foreign to the (again, super racist) narrator.

“[Captain Kurtz] began with the argument that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, must necessarily appear to the savages as supernatural beings - we approach them with the might of a deity."

Alliteration /w/

Metaphor

Juxtaposition through lexical choice

• Emphasizes us vs. them ideology by linking “we” and “whites” through alliteration.
• Europeans/White people implied as being gods, emphasizes supremacy (RACIST BOOK!!!)

Seriously, this book definitely critiques colonialism, but it is super problematic and racist!!!!

• Savages vs supernatural beings - draws attention to the divide in hierarchy.

 "They were dying slowly—it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now, nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation lying confusedly in the greenish gloom."

Asyndeton

Anaphora

Metaphors

Long Vowel Sounds

• Reducing the language (removing conjunctions) in harmony with the depiction of natives as savage; the primitive version of the languages underscores the primitive men (RACIST)!

• Emphasizes what they are not, which is anything human.

• Imply that the natives are less than human; they are associated with death. Evokes very negative emotions due to sickly depictions.

• Long /e:/ in “green” and /u:/ in “gloom” underscore the negative portrayal of death by evoking thoughts of wheezing (struggling to breath) through the long sounds.

“We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil. But suddenly as we struggled round a bend there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage.”

Metaphor

Lexical Choice

Auditory Imagery

Asyndeton