HTML1DocumentEncodingutf-8″Mistah” Kurtz, in Heart of Darkness, is one of Korzeniowski’s revenants: “He rose, unsteady, long, pale, indistinct like a vapour exhaled by the earth, and swayed slightly, misty and silent before me” (64).
Kurtz originates in the “misseds” of time–after the brief attack by the natives, Marlow concludes that Kurtz is now missing– “vanished”–and confesses, in his most intimate moment, that his sorrow at this thought “had a startling extravagance of emotion.” Seized with “lonely desolation,” he feels as if he had “been robbed of a belief or had missed [his] destiny in life” (48).
This sense of lack helps us understand why Conrad’s Marlow “was anxious to deal with this shadow by myself alone”–even though, he adds, “to this day I don’t know why I was so jealous of sharing with anyone the peculiar blackness of that experience” (64).
He is, so to speak, niggard of his narcissism: he cannot truly share experience, coming as it does out of his past, because, being known, it would no longer be his unique, individual, peculiar past, and he would then no longer be his present self. As an author “unconsciously compelled now to write volume after volume” (PR 18), he no doubt feels unconsciously compelled to protect his (self-)investment. Besides, as Marlow says of his fellow man upon his return from the depths of Congo-Conrad’s “Inner Station,” “I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew” (70)–and why? “I had no clear perception of what it was I really wanted” (71).
The Essay on Heart Of Darkness Kurtz Marlow Remarkable
Each person has a different definition of what the term 'remarkable' means; each unique definition, holds a significant link to the other. This link is that the term is always given to a person that holds certain characteristics that are superior to the average individual. The set of characteristics that are observed tend to subscribe to the specific set of values of the person issuing the remark. ...
Critics now commonly point to Marlow’s nervous disorder at the end (hence, beginning) of the tale, but above that narrator (like the eye above the writing hand) is another who, paradoxically, writes so as not to be understood–so to have the job, the occupation of going-on-not-being- understood–and so as not to understand himself. “The inner truth is hidden–luckily, luckily” (36).
When this subtle psychological machine functions (“`”You are so subtle, Marlow”‘” [LJ 112]), Conrad has the pregnant satisfaction of experiencing the “brooding gloom,” “gloom brooding” whose inspiring presence he signals no less than five times at the beginning of Heart of Darkness. Later he confides to his old friend Edward Garnett, “before everything switch off the critical current of your mind and work in darkness–the creative darkness which no ghost of responsibility will haunt” (11 Aug. 1920, Garnett 273).
But working with mystery, in darkness, in dream, unconsciously–“all my work is produced unconsciously” (24 Sep.
1895, CL 1.246)–one rarely finds anything definite, words least of all. In The End of the Tether, for instance, a father decides on the name “Ivy” for his daughter “because of the sound of the word, and obscurely fascinated by a vague The more duplicitous Marlow gives this challenge regarding Kurtz: “I did not see the man in the name any more than you do” (29).
He draws attention to the name again with “Kurtz–Kurtz–that means `short’ in German–don’t it?” (59).
Well, yes, “short,” or “brief,” or “concise,” but the spelling is kurz. One critic details similarities between Kurtz and Apollo Korzeniowski, beginning with the likeness of their names (Crews 522 fn.), and another argues that, “To call his villain Kurtz … was to memorialize this phase of his life when he was not yet Joseph Conrad but still Konrad Korzeniowski–a name prone to be shortened to Korz” (Ellmann 18).
The Term Paper on Restraint And Man Marlow Kurtz Darkness
There are many themes that run through the novel Heart of Darkness. There are however two main and significant ones. These are the theme of restraint and mans journey into self. The importance of restraint is stressed throughout Heart of Darkness. In the novel Marlow is saved by restraint, while Kurtz is doomed by his lack of it. Marlow felt different about Africa before he went, because the ...
No evidence is offered for such shortening, but it’s hardly necessary given the text’s clear suggestion of a curtailed Korzeniowski. The connection is pressing enough to be made earlier, as Marlow discovers on the copy of An Inquiry into Some Points of Seamanship by “Towser, Towson–some such name,” “a signature, but it was illegible–not Kurtz–a much longer word” (39)–implying that the name at least began Kur–or Kor.
(One might remark the pivotal role of the word “cur” in drawing together Marlow and Jim [LJ 94-102]).
Conrad writes, anyway, that “the name was as true as everything else in his life–and death” (59; never mind who it is: Konrad is “I am missing innumerable shades,” 3 says Marlow; “–they were so fine, so difficult to render in colourless words” (LJ 112).
Absence of color is absence of light, and in Heart of Darkness we hear the trick of using black, dark, colorless words to render some of the missing shades–as with the women so dramatically absent from the narrative, for example. Forgetting his Nietzsche, Marlow remarks that “It’s queer how out of touch with truth women are!” (16).
4 Then, emphasizing the truth of the phrase crediting their being in the present (“women are”), he continues: “They live in a world of their own and [shifting graphemes] there [shifting tenses] had never been anything like it and [arrogating perspective] never can be.” Their world which he imagines “is too beautiful altogether,” and “if they were to set it up it would go to pieces …” [emphasis added]. To appreciate the pun which then follows, note that Conrad had already written a female acquaintance that “[w]omen have a more penetrating vision, and a greater endurance of life’s perversities” (27 Jan 1897, CL 1.334): “Some confounded fact which we men have been living contentedly with ever since the day of creation, would start up and knock the whole thing over” (emphasis added).
The confounded fact, it seems, is patriarchy itself. In an adjacent pun, Marlow remarks that to his aunt’s eyes, “It appears however that I was also one of the Workers, with a capital–you know” (15).
The Essay on Heart Of Darkness Marlow Conrad Kurtz
Heart of Darkness For most of his young life, Joseph Conrad has had a burning desire to be a seaman; and in 1874, when he is just sixteen years of age, his dream becomes a reality. In addition, he worked his way up through the ranks and piloted a merchant ship up the mighty Congo River in central Africa. Later, it is the memory of this voyage that provides him with the first hand details for ...
What we know is that with no Capital he is, following Marx, a Worker indeed. Though considered by his aunt “something like a lower sort of apostle,” Marlow casts off the prophet-motive by venturing “to hint that the The way to the realm of the missed lies beyond “the door of Darkness” (14).
To get to his story Marlow comes to “a city that always reminds me of a whited sepulchre” (13), and passes through “narrow and deserted streets” to arrive at a house “as still as a house in a city of the dead” (14).
Slipping through a crack, he ends up before two women dressed in black, whose knitting has for some critics associated them with the first two fates, Lachesis and Clotho, though their activity might equally evoke one of Conrad’s fantasies of “it”: a universal “knitting machine” which “knits us in and it knits us out.
It has knitted time, space, pain, death, corruption, despair and all the illusions–and nothing matters” (20 Dec. 1897, CL 1.425).
One knitter “wore a starched white affair on her head” and seems to know all about Marlow since, he reports, “An eerie feeling came over me. She seemed uncanny and fateful. Often far away there [appropriately weird syntax] I thought of these two, guarding the door of Darkness” (14).
The uncanny, Freud argues, comes from experiencing, dimly perceiving, our compulsion to repeat–and certainly Conrad’s narrator has been nearby this door before (in 1869) and will be there again (in 1914).
In “Poland Revisited” (1915) the author relates how a return visit to Cracow the previous year brought back the memory of “a small boy of eleven,” beset by “a private gnawing worm of my own” at “the time of my father’s last illness” (223).
Recalling his return from school I walked all the way to a big old house in a quiet narrow street …. There, in a large drawing- room, panelled and bare, with heavy cornices and a lofty ceiling, in a little oasis of light made by two candles in a desert of dusk, I sat at a little table to worry and ink myself all over till the task of my preparation was done. The table of my toil faced a tall white door, which was kept closed; now and then it would come ajar and a nun in a white coif would squeeze herself through the crack, glide across the room, and disappear. There were two of these noiseless nursing nuns.
The Term Paper on Clinton Nixon Impeachment White House
Impeachment is the ultimate punishment for a president. It is a long and complicated rout to removing a public official from office. The Constitutional process Article II, section 4 specifies the procedures to be used to remove a public official from office (CNN/All Politics). The constitution states that and president found guilty for bribery, treason, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.There ...
