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Heart of Darkness
Fiction e-Book-of-the-Month, Mar 2000. THE HORROR is not the voyage into the dark heart of Africa, but into the darkness of the human soul. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad's most powerful work, recounts a journey by his narrator, Marlow, into the deep of the Belgian Congo, in search of the trader Kurtz. His journey is mesmerizing - we cannot help but watch the natural and moral deterioration of the world as he progresses closer and closer to his goal, and, when he reaches it, the ultimate paean of despair. A masterpiece of the early twentieth-century, Conrad's view of the brutality of colonialism, the search for redemption, and the immediacy of personal responsibility, can transfigure even present-day readers. As Joyce Carol Oates said: "Heart of Darkness has had an influence that goes beyond the specifically literary. This parable of a man's 'heart of darkness' dramatized in the alleged 'Dark Continent' of Africa transcended its late Victorian era to acquire the stature of one of the great, if troubling, visionary works of Western civilization."
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