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Heart Of Darkness Blindness Essay

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“Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything?” (24) Man is blind. Power and savagery combine to form an impenetrable wall, concealing the truth. Vision and comprehension are constantly obscured throughout the novel, Heart of Darkness, as Marlow journeys through the Congo with an attempt of “penetrating the darkness of the heart of the dark jungle and of the savagery which it nourishes” to find the truth hiding in the dark, only to find this dark fog impervious (Dowden). Through the use of blindness, Conrad displays an inability of man to see the truth.
Throughout the novel, Marlow and his crew encounter fog, which obscures their vision more and more, the deeper they get into the jungle. As Brandon Kershner states, Conrad seems to play on “the interest in immediate perception, especially in difficult conditions for visual perception and comprehension…; the interest in smoke, fog, mist, and so forth as an integral part of the subject’s representation” (Kershner). One morning when the sailors get close to the heart of the jungle where Kurtz lies, they wake up to “a white fog, very warm and more blinding than the night.” (35) Just as Marlow and the other sailors cannot see clearly in the jungle, they fail to see …show more content…
Marlow is retelling this whole story to his crewmates aboard the ship but is struggling to get the true meaning of the story across to them. “It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream---making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream sensation” (24). Conrad gives the reader an obscured feel, almost as if a fog was surrounding Marlow’s tale. The men listening could not see the story for what it was no matter how hard Marlow tried. The fact that the men couldn’t fully understand Marlow’s story symbolizes the inability of man as a whole to see the truth. Seeing the complete truth is like living another man’s dream, simply

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