The Figure of the Adventurer in Literature

The manifest action of The Tempest turns on the issue of rebellion and authority. The opening storm begins the revenge of the magician Prospero on Antonio, the Duke of Milan. As Prospero explains to Miranda in I.ii, he is the rightful duke. Some years earlier he had delegated most of his authority to his brother Antonio, who, by a combination of conspiracy with Alonso, King of Naples and of Prospero's own neglect of "worldly ends" in favor of "liberal arts" (I.ii), marched on Milan, captured Prospero and Miranda, and set them adrift at sea. The boat's drifted to the island allowed Prospero to study and refine his magic talents. He conjures the tempest and a shipwreck of Naples and Milan with a view toward engineering a countercoup against Antonio and returning to his rightful place in the world.

The action of Heart of Darkness turns on the implementation and enactment of institutional authority and the discovery of the opportunity for and consequences of individual appropriation and manipulation of such authority. Marlow,

. . .
ile not entirely escaping its psychological impact. Hodgkins (passim) cites a difference between Shakespeare's comedy and Heart of Darkness's brooding mood, as well as between Prospero's self-redeeming behavior in abjuring what could be called the "rough magic" (V.i) of his colonial project and the failure of Conrad's Kurtz to relinquish (or escape from; the text is neither light nor crystal clear on this point) the perquisites of colonialism at the extreme. In the environment of his island, Prospero as exiled wanderer comes to a clearer conception of his responsibilities to and fortunes in Milan, by way of his position as demigod and king of the island. In the environment of the Inner Station, Kurtz pursues the status of demigod among the primitive peoples he was sent to exploit, plunder, kill as needed, study, report on, and perhaps later return to redeem for and with civilization. Kurtz is far from rejecting worship, or even from accepting it for mainly pragmatic reasons, like Cook or Kipling's Dan and Peachey. Rather, this former "emissary of light" counts godhood a thing to be grasped, shaken out, throttled, and devoured with a relish-rather like the victim at a cannibal feast. The Darwinian beastliness that Marlow discovers
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 3659
Approximate Pages = 15 (250 words per page)

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