Two Themes in Heart Of Darkness :: Heart Darkness essays

Two Themes in Heart Of Darkness         There are gentlemany themes that roam through the novel Heart of Darkness. There are however two main and significant ones.  These are the theme of control condition and mans journey into self.         The importance of constraint is stressed throughout Heart of Darkness.  In the novel Marlow is saved by restraint, while Kurtz is doomed by his lack of it.         Marlow felt different about Africa onward he went, because the colonization of the Congo had an idea at the back of it.  Despite an uneasiness, he assumed that restraint would operate there.  He soon reaches the Company spot and receives his first shock, everything there seems meaningless.  He sees no evidence here of that devotion to efficiency that makes the idea work.  In the middle of this, Marlow meets a miracle. The chief accountant has the restraint that it takes to g et the job done. He keeps up his apearance and his books are in apple-pie order.  Marlow respects this fellow because he has a backbone.         The cannibals some of those ignorant millions, are almost tout ensemble characterized by restraint.  They outnumber the whites thirty to five and could easily fill their starving bellies.  Marlow would have as soon expected restraint from a hyena prowling amongst the corpses of a battlefield.  The cannibals action is one of those human secrets that baffle probability.  This helps Marlow keep his restraint, for if the natives can possess this quality Marlow feels he certainly can.         Kurtz is the essence of the lack of restraint Marlow sees everywhere.  Kurtz has kicked himself loose from the earth.  He owes no allegiance to anything except those animal powers, those various lusts, those unpermitted aspirations lurking in the darkness of his inner stat ion. Marlow also responds to these dark callings, and he almost becomes their captive.  He confuses the beat of the beat (the call to mans primitive side) with his own heartbeat, and is pleased.  Yet he does not slip over the edge as Kurtz does.  Marlow keeps to the track.  When he is confronted with the ultimate evil where a man must fall back on (his) own innate strength, upon (his) own capacity for faithfulness,  he is able to do so,