The Orphan Characters of in Conrads Heart of Darkness Essay -- Heart o

The Orphan Characters of Heart of Darkness All Conrads major characters are, in a fundamental sense, orphans. To men like Marlow, his parents offer him no ordain place in an ordered world, or, if such a place exists, they do not feel it is a real alternative for them. The knowledge of a hostile, annihilating force at the center of existence brings to Conrads characters a unbroken sense of their personal vulnerability. Before this revelation, they were orphans in search of a understanding for their lives, but they never doubted their ability to disc everywhere such a ground. For to the highest degree of Conrads characters, the experience of vulnerability marks the real beginning of their voyage. Conrads novels are attempts to hail to terms with this experience, to work out ways of living with or overcoming this knowledge, for entirely if some such way behind be found can man ever attain a stable identity. Perhaps thinker can confront the darkness directly and master it. Alth ough this darkness is in its essence something alien to mind, if mind can asset its control over this force, if it can give it rational form and substance and thus mint the image of the ombre sinistre et fuyante the darkness will be robbed of its destructive potential. By ingest its sources in this way, it might still be possible for man to accomplish self, sufficiency. While he will not conduct found a father, found some source, which naturally confers its reality upon him, man will have made one. For most of Conrads characters, the initial thrust of their attempt to assert reign over the ground of their existence is directed toward its immediate source in the irrational. Ultimately, however, mans efforts to control the darkness must lead him beyond t... ...land it is among the things they order correct in France. Mr.Graham Greene, who has learned both from France and Conrad, has grasped this fact, and never proposes to make our flesh mouse as Conrad and James in these stori es do. Kurtz may be described as the logical consequence for any man of admitting a breach in those defenses that the guarding of personal integrity constantly requires. The line of human heads with which his station had been embellished plainly showed, Marlow reflects, that there was something wanting in him- some small matter which, when the pressure need arose, could not be bound. Or- as it is expressed elsewhere - his nerves went wrong. There are several other tales of this period- notably Falk and The End of the Tether-, which turn upon this theme. And it makes, if with a somewhat less lurid coloring, the priming coat of Lord Jim (1900). (22)