Heart Of Darkness

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be paralleled to darkness and unknown aspects of one’s own self. This aspect provides for the metaphorical ways of interpreting the novel. The novel opens on the deck of a large sailing vessel called the Nellie. As the reader is introduced to each character onboard the ship the sun is continuing its decent and shortly all will be exposed to the utter darkness brought upon with the approach of night. Marlow then begins the journey, which will bring the reader into the far reaches of the African Congo. This beginning scene is the first use of the darkness. These images are used to foreshadow the mystery of what lies ahead for Marlow on his journey. Marlow uses the first images of light verses the dark or the civilized verses the uncivilized when he imagines what the past must have been like on the Thames Estuary:
…Light came out of this river since- you say Knights? Yes; but it was like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in a ...

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left behind by great explorers. These colonies barely survive; they neither expand nor retract as the years continue to pass by. The light of civilization obviously does not belong in a place as blackened with uncivilized cultures as in Africa. The light has been unable to penetrate the darkness. Once locked within the country Marlow finds his surroundings extremely harsh:
The Congo is described as a place of intense mystery whose stifling heat, whispering sounds, and strange shifts of light and darkness place the foreigner in a kind of trance which produces fundamental changes in the brain, causing acts that range from the merely bizarre to the most extreme and irrational ...

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