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Heart Of Darkness Section 2 Essay

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In Section II of the novel, Conrad parallels Marlow’s travel deeper inland to his psychological journey further into the unknown wild. Marlow states that moving inward is like “travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the Earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest” (Conrad 49). This connection with traveling back in time is an important message about the novel’s setting. As Marlow narrates the river on a different river in a different land, the notion of traveling backward in time alludes to the fact that England’s past is compared to Africa’s present, a territory being conquered by a more civilized group of people. Marlow’s physical change of location, …show more content…

Marlow narrates that he later judged the apparent attack as “really an attempt at repulse. The action was very far from being aggressive–it was not even defensive, in the usual sense: it was undertaken under the stress of desperation, and in its essence was purely protective” (65). After earlier stating that he did not expect the natives to attack, the ominous white fog lifts and the natives attack the steamboat out of surprise and fear. They are hidden in the brush, almost as if to suggest that Marlow views them as little more than part of the land, animals of a new terrain to conquer. Marlow’s immediate reaction to the helmsman’s murder is to keep focusing on steering the boat, despite blood literally seeping into his shoes. In spite of that, Marlow has developed a bond with his associates that he only becomes cognizant of after the helmsman dies, when he realizes that he misses the man. Unable to wear shoes soaked in blood, and unable to bear the death of the man with every step, he disposes of his shoes. Present-narrator Marlow suggests that the blind shooting of the Europeans is like the barrage into the coastline earlier in the novel, an inappropriate reaction to largely protective actions by the indigenous people. The natives are attacking out of fear for their lives and land, but the pilgrims are shooting out of a fear of the unknown, a fear of the Africans’ percepted savagery, a fear of darkness. From when they began to plunge into the continent, the colonists still are afraid of the immense darkness that lies more inside them than out, as becomes more and more

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