I understand this is posted really...REALLY late, and I apologize immensely to the student who has to comment on my posts, but I have undergone a lot of complications and stress due to outside circumstances that nobody really wants to even think about hearing. So, for the sake of punctuality, let us move forward.
Let me just say that I did not enjoy reading this novella. Although I did find a bushel of symbolism amongst its pages, every second spent reading this novella was very, very irritating. Conrad's overuse of adjectives and descriptions and imagery made the reading tedious and boring. I do not even think that this story can follow the old, traditional plot chart from middle school. Sure, it had a start and an end, but a climax? Eh, maybe. A catharsis? For me, definitely not.
The whole way that Conrad kept building Kurtz up to be this great genius of a man was very anticlimactic when Kurtz was actually introduced and went from an idea to a person. I personally felt offended that all of that build-up led to absolutely nothing impressive. There was no mystery left about Kurtz; every other character Marlow had talked to had revealed everything there was to know. He was a genius, he had an insatiable lust for ivory, the natives revered him, he was sick...that's great, but for being the main drive of Marlow's journey forward into the Heart of Darkness, as a reader I was expecting some kind of interesting twist in his characterization, but no. Kurtz was exactly what everyone in Africa had said he was, and all of that added up to be flat out boring.
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