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Compare And Contrast Man's Disobedience To God In Paradise Lost And Heart Of Darkness

Good Essays

Man and Mammon: Man’s Disobedience to God in
John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
Man’s disobedience from God is first begun in the pages of John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, and seen to continue in Joseph Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness. Disobedience, or the failure to obey someone in authority, often first stems from the capacity for free will; free will, the notion that you or anyone else could make any decision in the world and it would be your choice to make, no one else’s. But this raises the question of from what divine action has free will been imbued among humanity. What has given humans the capacity to make decisions? Following the pages of Milton’s Paradise Lost, this is shown to be God’s doing. …show more content…

Mary C. Fenton’s article outlines how “land for humanity [is] no longer God’s organic and indivisible terrain, … but instead a material object in the … world’s struggle between good and evil.” (170) Humanity divides the land and, in the past just as with Heart of Darkness, there is a major pursuit to obtain more land as it comes hand in hand with obtaining more riches. This quest to discover land is still a pursuit for profit since land has become a material object, something of value. Even with Imperialism, we have seen the effects of what this struggle has caused. The good of those who have pure intentions (akin to Marlow) and the evil who are simply set out to profit and grow their wealth (like the Director of the Company). Jukka Gronow’s article on Imperialism and how it is connected to Capitalism suggests that “Imperialism reveals the exploitative nature of capitalism at its clearest,” (152) and in Heart of Darkness, this exploitative nature is very clear from the start. This is not a culture driven by the pursuit of happiness (through religion or God), but rather the pursuit of profit. Marlow observed that “the word ‘ivory’ rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it,” (Conrad, 2423) and they were in some sense. The Imperialist culture had been built for so long on the pursuit of wealth that ivory would have been a great source of profit …show more content…

Heart of Darkness. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt. 9th ed. New York: Norton, 2013. 2407-2465. Print.
Fenton, Mary C. “Hope, Land Ownership, and Milton's ‘Paradise Within.’” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 43, no. 1, 2003, pp. 151–180. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4625062.
Gronow, Jukka. “Imperialism as the Truth about Capitalism.” On the Formation of Marxism: Karl Kautsky’s Theory of Capitalism, the Marxism of the Second International and Karl Marx’s Critique of Political Economy, Brill, LEIDEN; BOSTON, 2016, pp. 151–156. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1163/j.ctt1w8h23p.15.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt. 9th ed. New York: Norton, 2013. 799-929.

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