Heart of Darkness Blog #3

Much of this reading is just going way over my head. its very very dense. i did think a very prominent theme in part two though was the talk of the land - of Africa, of the jungle. Conrad uses personification in a way that portrays the jungle to have a mind or a force of its own. a force that takes hold of the people living in it and changes their souls. He says, "We are accustomed to look upon the shacked form of a conquered monster, but there - there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were - no they were not inhuman. " Unlike Europe which is controlled and conquered by man - this dark land controls the people instead. THe land is not shackled. it is monstrous and free. It is like he will stop in the middle of the story in a way just to describe the outside environment and add the aspect of the heaviness of the earth around Marlow and everyone else. Not only are bad things happening to the people -to the natives - to the souls of everyone there but there is this immense power that constantly surrounds them and isolates them from the rest of the world - the civilization - the light. "Trees, trees, millions of trees, massive, immense, running up high; and at their foot, hugging the bank against the stream, crept the little begrimed steamboat, like a sluggish beetle crawling on the floor of a lofty portico. It made you feel very small, very lost, and yet it was not altogether depressing, that feeling."  And it seems that the people in the "darkness," do not notice the power of the land as much. Yes they may feel small - but it is not as if it depresses them. it just subconciously changes them into something else. something darker. as if the "immense trees" swallow them up.