The Cosmogonic Cycle in Conrads Heart of Darkness :: Heart Darkness essays

The Cosmogonic Cycle in Heart of Darkness The brusque novel Heart of Darkness tells a story just give care any other hacekic myth, except better. This novel rewards an educated reader. some(prenominal) find the work to be extremely confusing, and actu all in ally quite dull. though it is a complicated book, a reader is stimulated by the symbols and philology used by Conrad. The most noticeable is the flaw in the cosmogeny Cycle. This cycle is an integral part of every heros journey. An crucial step in the cycle, the second step in fact, is finding a guide, either spiritual or tangible. If one were to look hard complete in most works of canonical literature, he would find all the necessary components of the Cosmogonic Cycle on the protagonists journey, the choke into the underworld, confronting the father figure, meeting, and saving, a female prisoner, then the journey back into the conscious. A guide is there to lead the hero. He generally is a gentlemans gentleman or woman who has been on a similar journey and knows the pitfalls where the hero may fall. Without this figure in Marlows journey, he fell into the enticement of staying in the unconscious evil domain. Conrad never gave Marlow a guide, in essence, dooming him to become his mission. At the beginning of the protagonists journey it seemed as though the two women . . . knitting black wool (Conrad 13) in the trading nerve office were there to foreshadow the mortal death of Marlow. One may have drawn this conclusion because this is an obvious reference to the women who knitted tour watching aristocrats executed by the guillotine during the French Revolution. I conceive it meant something much more deep. A good writer, one of Conrads caliber, does not place superfluous scenes, words, or phrases in his or her book. He writes tho what he needs to write. With that in mind, because Marlow did not die at the mop up of his journey, therefore the women then had to represent something else. They f oreshadowed the death of Marlows intelligence. They knew he was without a spirit guide because they were aware the Trading Company had not offered him one. They too knew Kurtz hadnt had a guide either. There were multiple uses of the word soul in the final chapter, many of which talked of the inability for a mans soul to escape the forest.