Literary Analysis-Heart of Darkness

1. The plot is about an Englishman named Charles Marlow. He and his crew are on a river in Africa for trading purposes. He is supposed to be taking ivory down the river, but his real job is to take a man named Kurtz, back to civilization. Along the way, essentially, Marlow sees the evils of how Europe is trying to colonize the African countries.  He sees how the African people are brutally mistreated and makes him wonder about the darkness in every human for being able to do such terrible things.

2. The theme of the Heart of Darkness is the evil of colonization. The novel is big on this theme. It show time and time again the evils of colonization, not just to the native African's, but also to some of the whites that live there as well.

3. The author's tone is very cynical.

•  “And this also,’ said Marlow suddenly, ‘has been one of the dark places of the earth.’”
• “It was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—the suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces"
• “It was reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage.”

4. The syntax, foreshadowing, tone, and diction help make this book much easier to understand. The diction and syntax is not that hard to understand. Joseph Conrad uses mildly difficult syntax, but it is nothing that I can't understand, it is the meaning behind what he is trying to say that makes this book a little bit confusing. Joseph Conrad also uses foreshadowing in the book. When Marlow tells stories of England, it shows the type of characters that we are going to meet later in the story, for example he foreshadows the meeting with Kurtz. It's easy to detect foreshadowing because the story is told from a looking back standpoint. The tone is very cynical and dark. The message is dark because the books wants to show the evils of colonization.