hello friends we are almost done arts one and we get to finish it off with some quicker readings! not gonna lie, i was pretty excited to see that this book was pretty short…
either way, i was actually really excited to read this book because ever since master and the margarita (which is by far my favourite text from this year!) ive been looking forward to more fiction over the rest of the year! i enjoyed the kingdom of this world and northanger abbey, but it was just nice to do more fictional works before the end of the year. i really liked reading heart of darkness because it really reminded me of the more gritty adventuring works that i used to read in social studies in high school! i’ve always liked fictional stories in historical contexts! i’ve actually never read much to do with the ivory trade, so it was nice to be able to read something about it.
i personally found it hard to sympathize with kurtz throughout the book, especially near the end when his poor fiancee was lied to about her name being his last words to hide the truth. it also seemed to me that marlow did this because of how certain she was that he loved her and he kind of passed it off as her being detached from reality when really, wouldnt it be less her fault and more kurtz’s fault for deceiving her and making her believe that he loved her…
i dont know, thats a pretty specific part of the book to think about! but yeah, there’s my thoughts on conrad’s text! to be honest im kind of confused about how this relates to the theme and de beauvoir, so hopefully those questions will be answered during the seminars!!
nicole
hmmm…relating to de Beauvoir, not so much. Well, maybe through the idea of “otherness,” whether through the lens of gender or race. Relating to the theme: this text is one that is “remade” in the film Apocalypse Now, and we’re also reading a very different picture of Africa and the intrusion of “civilizing” European influences with Achebe’s novel for next week. That’s how we were thinking of it fitting into the theme!
And about Kurtz and the Intended…I wonder if he really didn’t love her, or if Marlow just couldn’t bring himself to say what Kurtz’s last words really were. At any rate, I’m not sure we have enough in the text to know for sure how Kurtz felt about her! But this whole last scene with the Intended is quite puzzling to me overall. It’s obviously a crucial scene, since Marlow could have just ended the book with going back to Brussels after the whole ordeal and leaving it at that. But I’m not sure what we’re meant to get from this discussion with the Intended (nor why she doesn’t have a name in the text!).