The Not So Dark Darkness

As i read The Heart of Darkness I seem to find the subtle dark tendencies that Jospeh Conrad is trying to convey to his reader. Through the use of conspiracy and lies Joseph Conrad seems to show that perhaps the savages are bathed in white, and are not lurking in the shadows of the vast jungle that is the continent they are so vehemently trying to civilize. It is the white man that needs to learn to become civilized.

As i read through this fascinating book i annotated it for its style, which is essentially performing a rhetorical analysis of the writer. As i read i started to realize that his diction is quite distinct and that what kept popping out to me was the fact that he was very syncapated in his riding. The whole entire time i read it felt like the lines had a bounce to them in my head, and this really helped me to remember very important happenings in the book and set a very distinct pace for the book overall. I really liked how he was able to set the pace for the reader and i wanted to know how did that and i came to realize that the way in which he did this was the use of commas and prepositional phrasing that was broken up by interrupting clauses and speech. I want to learn how to apply this strategy in my writing so that i can try to set the pace for readers who may come across something i might compose.

One the thing that i didnt like was how the plot was told. The whole entire time the main character was the Captain of the ship in the present day, and he was telling the story of him going to a continent where they were gathering ivory and trying to explore the uncharted places of that continent. All the while i was trying to figure out what the people listening to the story in the book were thinking and i couldnt stay concentrated because the whole time i was thinking about the fact that maybe this guy isnt even the main character that the Captain who was telling the story should be a secondary character but no he kept on telling the story and telling the story.

I felt like one of his crew who had to sit there and listen to this story...even i started to fall asleep.

The reason why i started to lose my interest was because i already figured out the message that Joseph Conrad was trying to send so i figured the rest of the story couldnt be that important. I stopped looking for the important message throughout the rest of the book so it all kind of started to blur for me and i had to go back and re-read certain areas because i just started reading the words and not the story.

All in all i think that this book had a pretty good message about the darkness that is in all hearts and the deceit that can overtake all of us, while he contrasted it with the "savages" who were really the most civilized in the whole book.

It makes me wonder...did the white man turn "savages" into the savages they wanted them to be...?