from the light comes the dark { chapter 2 }

Chapter 2 from its beginning ignites a deepening feeling of darkness and not merely in the form of excessive adjectives, but this time in the face of actual night hours. I myself hadn’t actually noticed it before until reading the first few pages again to assure I wasn’t entirely losing myself as usual in the excessive word brooding shadows of every sentence. Anyway, from light to dark, the transformation of the day represents a change in the knowledge of man within a continent that none of them are remotely familiar with. Light represents knowledge and a clear pathway for an individual to cross while darkness represents the unknown and a sudden lack of knowing as to which direction is correct or blindness towards a specific scenario. Marlow has teetered on the line of knowledge and obliviousness as shown in his treatment of women and the Africans and the Imperialists of the Company have also faced the familiarity of their mother country and its customs and the savage darkness that they must encounter by following the river inward on their expedition.

While going along, the notion of rivers came up again and the relation to River Styx in Dante’s Inferno. Styx was referred to as the boundary line between the mortal world of Earth and the Underworld in Greek Mythology and the river that Marlow and his expedition is traveling slowly seems to delve into darkness with the change of day literally into a dark forest where they can see nothing whatsoever - which also revives the image of a dark wood once more where the unsure seem to often wander.

“In a few days the Eldorado Expedition went into the patient wilderness that closed upon it as the sea closes over the diver.”

This quote struck me the most simply because of the name of the expedition itself. El Dorado was the city of gold, a legend that sailors desired to locate in order to achieve unfathomable wealth and power by locating such. A symbol ? Oh, I think so. For the British, stocks of ivory represent wealth and power - something that Kurtz already seems to harbor plenty of. Searching for El Dorado led to nothing more than nothing; an emptiness, a lack of anything intended or found. Imperialism itself demolished most culture and resource from Africa, leaving it barren and empty when everything had been raped of its grasp. Though the British found and drained their "El Dorado" historically, the lack of true success from either side of the ordeal is prevalent.

[ Zach, I tried to post this early to make it convenient for you o3o ]