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The Myth Structure of Heart of Darkness

dead "hero" Kurtz, of whom Marlowe speaks, "She struck me as beautiful - I mean she had a beautiful expression. I know that the sunlight can be made to lie, too" (115).

Heart of Darkness' storyline begins in a Elysian setting of light and urban civility. Narrator Marlowe is guest aboard a sailboat, relaxing along an English river never far from the city. All is comfort and security. This is the world of theological religion, where philosophy is easy to contemplate. As night descends, a new mood takes over. Marlowe's narrative begins in shadow, erupting as a speculation on the darkness of the English river they float upon as it must have appeared two millennia earlier. The atavistic impulse of religion, with its "magic" of place and time, begins to assert itself. Then Marlowe rambles into his African tale - and anything familiar is lost within minutes. This is how A Midsummer Night's Dream and a score of other classic English myth-tales begin: first there is the city, where civilization holds sway over lives in an orderly fashion - but the protagonists soon find themselves in the wilderness, where fairies and magic overtake the night.

Marlowe is not describing fairies and pastoral religious magic, however, only the heated darkness of the jungle. He explains the decision to escape from civilization: a childhood longing to explore an undefined map, a city that reminds Marlowe of a biblical "whited sepulchre" (35). Then he travels to Africa itself, a journey that carries with it an air of slow futility. "I left in a French steamer," he recounts,

and she called in every blamed port they have out there, for, as far as I could see, the sole purpose of landing soldiers and custom-house officers. ... Some, I heard, got drowned in the surf; but whether they did or not, nobody seemed particularly to care. They were just flung out there, and on we went. (39-40)

This apathetic valuation of human life is the first of m...

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The Myth Structure of Heart of Darkness. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 17:47, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1700610.html