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

The Cosmogonic Cycle in Heart of Darkness The short unused Heart of Darkness tells a story just like any other wedge shapeic myth, except better. This novel rewards an educated reader. Many find the acidify to be extremely confusing, and actually quite dull. Though it is a complicated book, a reader is stimulated by the symbols and linguistics used by Conrad. The to the highest degree noticeable is the flaw in the Cosmogony Cycle. This cycle is an integral part of every heros journey. An important step in the cycle, the second step in fact, is finding a guide, either spiritual or tangible. If one were to look hard enough in most works of canonical literature, he would find all the necessary components of the Cosmogonic Cycle on the protagonists journey, the travel into the underworld, confronting the father figure, meeting, and saving, a female prisoner, then the journey backward into the conscious. A guide is there to lead the hero. He generally is a man or woman who has bee n on a similar journey and knows the pitfalls where the hero may fall. Without this figure in Marlows journey, he fell into the temptation of staying in the unconscious evil domain. Conrad never gave Marlow a guide, in essence, dooming him to fail his mission. At the beginning of the protagonists journey it seemed as though the two women . . . knitting black wool (Conrad 13) in the trading center 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 while watching aristocrats executed by the guillotine during the French Revolution. I believe it meant something much more deep. A good writer, one of Conrads caliber, does not place superfluous scenes, boys, or phrases in his or her book. He writes only what he needs to write. With that in mind, because Marlow did not die at the end of his journey, therefore the women then had to represent something else. They foreshadowed the death o f Marlows soul. They knew he was without a spirit guide because they were aware the Trading Company had not offered him one. They also 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.