Joseph Conrad, the author of the novel Heart of Darkness, used a lot of metaphors and symbolism to describe the conflict between black and white people. The novel is concentrated on the critique of the colonialism in Africa.
Joseph creates the leading character Marlow as a narrator. He tells us about his memories and explains the problem between Kurtz and him. The main idea of the novel is based on the determination of the roots of people evil, the impact of the surrounding environment on people attitude to the norms of ethics and moral as well as the understanding of the motives of people behavior under the difficult for survival circumstances.
Since the novel is saturated with the literature art techniques, it helps the audience to process information easily and to become engaged imaginatively and emotionally. In the passage from the reading the author uses such phrases as “filch a little money”, “devour infamous cookery”, “gulp unwholesome beer”, and “dream insignificant and silly dreams” to describe the life of people in the city. Those phrases create many spaces for the audience imagination.
While reading the paragraph, my personal imagination is giving me the feeling of darkness in the city as well as the images of the wretched people. The author describes their way of life, as though they are isolated from the developed world. The inhabitants live under the law of jungle. Indeed, it is the only way of survival for them. The author is trying to give us the feeling of “shuddering wonder”, while we are reading the description of the city, which is “the inconceivable world” with “no hope and no desire in it”.
The metaphors used in the novel are aimed at emotional enhancement of the work, the creation of not only vision of the city in our minds but also making us to feel the distress of this place, its anguish and the irritating environment at the same time.
The narrator describes local people as “intruders”, who irritate him with their primitive knowledge and desires. When reading the paragraph, we are deepening in thought of the emotional pressure, which this environment makes on the narrator. It is obvious that for a man from another part of the world, where the prevailing norms of ethics and moral contrasts to this primitive world, it is insufferably difficult to undergo the atmosphere in the city.
In general, the novel Heart of Darkness is full of figurative sense scenes. The author gives us the opportunity to comprehend the meaning of the particular situation or description by ourselves. He makes us thinking. Besides, Conrad uses special literature techniques, which are intended to enrich the scenes with preteritions, which make the details of the description almost invisible to our minds. In my view, these literature techniques also exist in the analyzed paragraph, because the author does not describe the exact view of the city streets or look of people but rather he gives us their presumptive images through metaphors and epithets.
In order to sum up all above mentioned, it should be said that the novel of Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness is the outstanding masterpiece of English literature of the XX century and a bright example of modernism in novels. The paragraph analyzed in the essay represents masterly used combination of literature techniques to give us the feeling of the described city atmosphere.