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

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30cm ; 52p.

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Litrature and Interdisciplinary Approaches