The Heart of Darkness

The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad was a difficult read for me for sure. It took me like a month to finish this book because I would read about ten pages and realize that I didn't remember a single thing that I had just read. For me, this book was hard to comprehend and grasp because the vocabulary was so high level and Conrad used so much description that it didn't even feel like a story to me. It is extremely difficult to read a book when you can't get a mental picture of what is going on because it's boring and frustrating. I got bored really easily while I was reading this book and that frustrated me because usually I love to read and I usually don't have a problem forming mental pictures. I had a really difficult time understanding the whole story part and how Marlow felt about Africa because I was so frustrated about how I couldn't even really read it and understand. The most frustrating part about reading Heart of Darkness was that while I read it I couldn't understand, and I got mad at myself for not understanding it. As I read it, i just kept thinking to myself:

"Everyone else can read and understand it, why can't I?!"

Personally I dont like reading books that have the style that Conrad used with his high level vocabulary and such because it just feels really pointless to me. Why read a book that doesn't even feel like a story?

Doing the MWD really helped me gather my thoughts about the Heart of Darkness, and as I was filling it out I realized that I really did grasp parts of it. For instance, I knew that the Congo river was a symbol for Marlow's journey to finding himself. Conrad used a lot of symbols and metaphors which I thought was pretty clever because it also made it a story within a story. Speaking of story inside of a story, I thought that it was really weird how the book was about a story being told by Marlow who was a character in the story. I also was curious as to who the narrator was the whole time. It didn't consume my thinking while I was reading, but it did kind of sit in the back of my mind.

As I read the book, I tried to summarize after every ten pages and it was kind of difficult because I usually had no idea what I was summarizing, but it helped a little bit. I usually went back and read the ten pages again after I finished summarizing and then I could pick up on things that I had missed when I summarized it the first time. I really like this annotating style because it helped me reflect and kind of forced me to at least some what comprehend what I was reading.

I really thought it was cool how the whole book was kind of Marlow's journey to finding himself because I think that it is really important for everyone to do this. it was cool to see it done in a different way that wasn't the "norm". Marlow had to go into the heart of Africa in order to find out who he really was and how true his integrity really was. So although this was a difficult read for me, I have to admit that the message of the story was pretty good and i'm glad that I read it.