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Heart Of Darkness

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Africa is home to one of the world’s darkest place. In Joseph Conrad’s groundbreaking novella Heart of Darkness, Charlie Marlow travels through the depths of Africa and witnesses some of the most horrifying things that can happen to a town or individual which ultimately darkens his opinion of mankind and their desires of wealth and greed. One of the places Marlow travels through is a town called Brussels which features a reach of destitution and a hole of nothingness. The artificial hole is a direct correlation to the town of Brussels because it has no real purpose in the world, everything in the town and the hole has something wrong with it, and these places are usually the resting place for all newcomers. Both the town of Brussels and the artificial hole have no real purpose in the world. The doctor tells Marlow that the people in Brussels “live in a world of their own” (Conrad 17) because they do not make any kind of contribution to the outside world. The work efforts of the people are wasted in the construction of a railroad on a cliff because “objectless blasting was all the work going on” (Conrad 19) therefore “no change appeared on the face of the …show more content…

The visit to the doctor opens Marlow’s eyes to the fact that most of the inhabitants of Brussels only go to the doctor once before disease or the hard life gets the better of them. There are both physical and “mental changes [in] individuals” (Conrad 16) in the reach making “the great[est] demoralization of the land” (Conrad 21) the idea that the reach is the place where people “[withdraw] to die” (Conrad 20). Likewise, the pieces of broken pipes are brought to the artificial hole with the sole intention of being left for good because “there wasn’t one that was not broken” (Conrad 20). The reach of Brussels and the artificial hole is the end of life and purpose for

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