The Readers Dilemma of Darkness Free Essay Example, 10500 words

This dilemma is a known one to readers of Conrad. The ingenious, moral man enters a dimension of peril and temptations; he fights, alone, to uphold his morality. Frequently he fails. But in Heart of Darkness, the issue is quite complicated, for here the probable moralities, the manners of control, may be perceived to be less accessible, as options or alternatives, illusory. Throughout the narrative, a reader is faced with an array of restraint that is evidently inadequate. The characters are playing dual personalities yet the narrative constricts the perspective of the readers to a very few important characters. The main accountant achieves something with his fussy dress, for instance, and the manager conceals his spiteful and recurrent dishonesty with a two-faced concern for saying and doing the appropriate thing. The most apparent instance of this fake kind of discipline is Marlow s indigenous helmsman; he thought all the world of himself. He was the most unstable kind of fool I had ever seen. He steered with no end of a swagger while you were by; but if he lost sight of you, he became instantly the prey of an abject funk, and would let that cripple of a steamboat get the upper hand of him in a minute. As a supplementary to these pseudo-moralities, there are men for whom control or discipline is useless: you may be too much of a fool to go wrong to dull even to know you are being assaulted by the power of darkness. ..We will write a custom essay sample on The Reader's Dilemma of Darkness or any topic specifically for you Only $17.96 $11.86/page Neither of these reactions to the wasteland is achievable for Marlow, nor, to Marlow s thought, for Kurtz. Both take pleasure in imagination and simple deceit to carry them to the presence of darkness .