The Heart of Darkness

Let me just start out saying, that I usually don't finish a book and think, "Wow, I really didn't enjoy that!" After reading this book, that was, unfortunately my exact thought. I enjoyed the story part of the book, but I did not understand Marlow's tangents from the main story. It was almost as if the reader was just taken inside of Marlow's mind where all those "tangents" were Marlow thinking to himself. He was working questions out, not necessarily for others to hear, but mostly for himself. That element of the book threw me off. Also, I sometimes did not understand all Marlow's description. Many times I was reading and he stated one thing, but elaborated on it so much, that I got confused if he was still talking about the same thing. My annotations did help some, because I would write what the topic was each time he started talking about it, and then if there was a topic change I tried to mark that so it was more visible for me to see.

The most shocking thing in this story was just how brutal the people were treated. The native Africans working on the Steamship were given close to no food, they were ordered around, and they were worked to the bone. The white men, or the 'pilgrims' as he referred to them treated the natives horribly, while they sat around and collected ivory.

Kurtz was an interesting character, but a confusing character. Up until the last section, I did not fully understand why he was so important, or why everyone looked up to him. he understood the natives, yet, he would do anything to get his hands on their ivory. He had piles of ivory, but he did not even want to sell it or leave the jungle. Maybe he had gone crazy, as the doctor who examined Marlow warned. Kurtz' death bed quote to me was profound. He saw everything that had gone on, he saw "the entire universe" and realized the horror that had taken place... What if people now took in everything happening over the world, and realized before they were dead, the horrible things taking place?

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