Darkness And Light Essay Research Paper Throughout

Darkness And Light Essay, Research Paper

Throughout his narrative in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Thomas Marlow characterizes events, ideas, and locations that he encounters in terms of light or darkness. Embedded in Marlow’s parlance is an ongoing metaphor equating light with knowledge and civility and darkness with mystery and savagery. When he begins his narrative, Marlow equates light and, therefore, civility, with reality, believing it to be a tangible expression of man’s natural state. Similarly, Marlow uses darkness to depict savagery as a vice having absconded with nature. But as he proceeds deeper into the heart of the African jungle and begins to understand savagery as a primitive form of civilization and, therefore, a reflection on his own reality, the metaphor shifts, until the narrator raises his head at the end of the novel to discover that the Thames seemed to ‘lead into the heart of an immense darkness.” The alteration of the light-dark metaphor corresponds with Marlow’s cognizance that the only ‘reality’, ‘truth’, or ‘light’ about civilization is that it is, regardless of appearances, unreal, absurd, and shrouded in ‘darkness’.

Marlow uses the contrast between darkness and light to underscore the schism between the seemingly disparate realms of civility and savagery, repeatedly associating light with knowledge and truth; darkness with mystery and deceptive evil. When Marlow realizes that his aunt’s acquaintances had misrepresented him to the Chief of the Inner Station, Marlow states, ‘Light dawned upon me’, as if to explicitly associate light with knowledge or cognizance. It is significant then, that Marlow later associates light with civilization. He describes the knights-errant who went out from the Thames to conquer the vast reaches of the world as having brought light into the darkness, flanked with figurative torches alongside their swords, ‘bearers of a spark from the sacred fire.” That Marlow directly correlates knowledge and light, and light and civilization, necessarily implies that Marlow seeks to correlate knowledge and civilization. In a word, Marlow’s delineation of the British imperialists implies that he understands civilization to be logical and rational, while he understands primitive social organizations to be backward and crude.

As Marlow proceeds deeper into the heart of the African jungle and begins to understand savagery as a primitive form of civilization and, therefore, a reflection on his own reality, the light-dark metaphor shifts. For example, when Marlow goes wandering in the jungle, he has contrasting experiences in the sunshine and in the shade that are ironic in light of the established metaphor. Contemplating the colonialists in the jungle, he remarks:

‘I’ve seen the devil of violence, and the devil of greed, and the devil of hot desire; but, by all the stars! These were strong, lusty, red-eyed devils, that swayed and drove men – men, I tell you. But as I stood on the hillside, I foresaw that in the blinding sunshine of that land I would become acquainted with a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly. How insidious he could be, too, I was only to find out several months later.’

That the ‘blazing sunlight’ would proffer to Marlow the realization that the civilized colonialists were little more than ‘flabby, pretending. devils’ is ironic. In keeping with the established metaphor, it would be logical for him to glimpse the intelligence and inherent goodness of the colonialists in the sunlight. The pun on the metaphor continues when Marlow departs the sunshine for the shade and is aloud to partake of the natives in their ‘natural’ habitat: the darkness. We would expect to see the natives in all their wanton savagery, but instead the darkness is ‘gloomy’ and filled with a ‘mournful stillness’ . As Marlow describes, ‘Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between trees, leaning against trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced with dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair.’ Note that Marlow describes the emaciated natives as being ‘half effaced with dim light’. He is just beginning to see the realities of civilization and progress, and the reality that the natives are not ‘the enemy’ or madly insane, but are sick, starving, dying, helpless, and weak; the partiality and dimness of the light reflects his half-awareness. As if to ensure the reader’s cognizance of the pun, fate would have it that as Marlow departs for the station from the shade, he runs into one of the colonialists: ‘I saw a high starched collar, white cuffs, a light alpaca jacket, snowy trousers, a clear silk necktie, and varnished boots.’ The contrast between the starving, deprived, wretched natives and this overfed, overdressed man parodies the man, while his dress (’white’, ’snowy’, ‘light’, ‘clear’, ‘varnished’) again makes a pun of Marlow’s understanding of light (the man’s tie also stands in august contrast to the absurd white worsted the black man had wrapped around his neck in the shade ). These pun provides a context for Marlow’s use of the metaphor later to critique the colonialists treatment of the savages: noticing a painting of Lady Justice in the manager’s station, Marlow observes: ‘The background was somber, almost black. The movement of the woman was stately, and the effect of the torchlight on the face was sinister.’ With this, the metaphor has come