Power and Horror in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899)
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Date
2019
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Université Mouloud Mammeri Tizi Ouzou
Abstract
This research paper explores the issues of power and horror in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness. It relies on Friedrich Nietzsche’s thoughts about power and some of its significant
concepts such as “the Will to Power” and “the Overman” that are mirrored through the story’s
plot and characters. Focus has been laid on the analyses of the characters and their true self;
through their behaviour and actions. To fulfil this study and make it clear, we have divided it
into six sections. It begins with the general introduction which gives a glimpse about the
nature of the work, and the points that will be discussed. It also contains issue and research
questions where we have explained the choice of relaying on Nietzsche’s concepts of “The
Will to Power” and “The Overman”.
After that comes method and material section which explains in details the two Nietzschean
concepts and their relation to Joseph Conrad’s novel. Moreover, the discussion section is
divided into three chapters; the first one is about the issues of hypocrisy and brutality of
imperialism in Heart of Darkness. As for the second chapter, it explores how the power of
jungle and the horror of its darkness functions as a counterpart of the European imperial
strategies. The last chapter is about how a savage environment can affect a civilized man;
Kurtz. The result section includes the major results reached in this dissertation. And finally,
the conclusion is the restatement or reformulation of the issues studies in the dissertation as
well as the conclusions reached on.
This study has reached some of the following conclusions. The first one is that a human
being is led by his will to power and he is always searching to satisfy his dominant desire in
the scale of values, and seeking for superiority makes him an overman. The second
conclusion is that while a man is driven by his desires, he may loose his internal world of
feelings, desires and thoughts, he soon falls into a dark nature and becomes submerged by
horror
Description
30cm ; 52p.
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Citation
Litrature and Interdisciplinary Approaches