57. Heart of Darkness

I think it's pretty obvious that I'm not going to reach my 100 book goal by mid-March, but I'm still keeping track of my reading. Nowadays, all my reading time is dedicated to my five English classes. That, and the slow going few pages a night through Ken Follet's massive Fall of Giants novel before bed. Here is Heart of Darkness, a novel I had to read for Non-Western World Literature class.

Book 57: Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (B)

I'll be honest, we covered this book in class for three days... it wasn't until Day 3 that I finally understood what was going on. I got the whole, someone telling a story inside another story. That was fine, but the way it was written was just confusing. Everything was just one huge block paragraph after another with no breaks for dialogue and barely any for switching scenes. I was beyond lost until I cornered one of my classmates and demanded that he explain the plot to me outside Coulter. What he said was exactly the background I needed to piece together the story, and I saw the light!!!

My final night of reading one of clarity and hope! I fell in love with the last third of the novel. I really wished my professor had done that the first day of class. According to her, she said that she thought everyone had read the novel in high school and to go over the background would be boring and repetitive. See, there's that ASS-U(&)ME thing again. It never ends well. No, I had to read that ridiculous thing of Things Fall Apart, which, yes... we're reading.
Heart of Darkness is the white man's perspective on how much imperialism sucks. It is told through the first-eye account of a man who then repeats the first-eye account of Marlow, an ivory man who traveled into the "heart of darkness" to fetch the goods and the infamous Kurtz. Marlowe and Kurtz have different opinions on the idea of being in Africa - Kurtz believes that imperialism is amazing. He's there to escape the suffocation of his clingy woman, My Intended, and to gain riches. Marlow sees the country for what it is and tells this story to try and show the beauty of Africa. However, according to my friend, his shipmates listening to the tale believe he's got nothing to be ashamed of. It's a tale of swashbuckling adventure not tragedy!
If I hadn't been so completely confused, this novel would have received a higher rating, but I completely missed the first half.