Heart of Darkness Exam

The Heart of Darkness exam will be on Tuesday. The final test will have two questions, each to be answered with a full thesis + four paragraph response.

1. Chinua Achebe argued that Heart of Darkness is an “offensive and deplorable book” that “set[s] Africa up as a foil to Europe, as a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe’s own state of spiritual grace will be manifest.”Is Achebe correct about Heart of Darkness? Does it reduce Africa and its people to the role of a foil for Europe? Or is Conrad’s point of view more complicated, using Marlow as an ironic commentator on colonialism?

2.   Explain how Heart of Darkness functions allegorically, focusing on characters. There are two sets of allegorical representations, at least. One is the ship’s crew; the other the Intended-African Queen-Kurtz triad. It would be fair to spend more time on Kurtz than the others, but do not neglect the other characters.

3.   Explain the deliberate juxtaposition of The Intended and the The Mistress. What do we learn from their implicit comparison? What lessons does Marlow learn?

4. Which argument makes more sense, that Marlow is the imperialist and racist alter ego of Joseph Conrad, or that he is an ironic character, one from which we are intended to learn that colonialism is wrong?

5. Heart of Darkness represents a narrative reconstruction of African and its people. How might this discourse, according to Edward Said have constructed a vision of Africa for European audiences that was untrue?

6. What, ultimately, does Conrad argue about human nature, solitude, and evil in Heart of Darkness?