Joseph Conrad.

Conrad and Forster are both transition writer because they share some characteristic with the
Victorian Age, but they also introduced some news.
Conrad writing style is in fact traditional, and belong to the Victorian Age: he chose to
complicate the narrative style by adopting a multiple points of view. Many of his novels have a
first-person narrator, who is also a character in the story, so this narrator cannot be fully
trusted.
The story is not told in a linear way, but includes flashbacks and time-shifts which make it
difficult to interpret.
The Modernism of Conrad’s novels lies in the gaps and silence which appear in the text,
indicating things that cannot be said or represented. He is also one of the first writers to
portray colonialism in a state of crisis. What is new and modernist in Conrad is the original
content of his novels. He spent most of his life at see, travelling and writing, so most of his
works are influenced by these travels. He wrote lots of adventures stories to exotic places, but
he uses these to symbolize the journey into the interior.
Conrad writes in a rich, vivid, prose style, characterised by a constant awareness of the
language that is his medium. He makes frequently use of personification and figurative
language which often creates very suggestive atmospheres.

Heart of Darkness
Different critics have seen Conrad either as pro-imperialist or as a critic of imperialist. On one
hand he was considered pro-imperialist because of the stereotypical presentation of black
people, and so this novel has been interpreted as a story about colonialism and a continuity of
imperialistic fiction. But on the other it was consider a denunciation of the mechanism of
colonialism, and of the exploitation of colonialists. From the very beginning Marlow has to
deal with the cruelty and the destructive process of colonialism, and exploitation. His
comments show Conrad’s desire to challenge the idealistic view of colonialism, which was
shared by many of his contemporaries and which can be summarised as the project of
civilising primitive peoples. Heart of Darkness can therefore be seen as a text which
challenges many conventions of imperialist travel writing and adventure fiction of the time.

Heart of Darkness refers to the wild centre of the jungle, but also to the dark side of the
human heart, this is not only a journey in space and time but also in the inner life of man. This
novel, therefore, has also been read as an inner journey into human consciousness. At the
beginning Kurtz was portrayed as a good man, but we gradually come to realise, as the story
continues , that Kurtz is at the same time a manifestation of extreme evil and savagery. But the
idea of darkness that is central to the story has other connotations: darkness represent also a
form of resistance to mapping and to colonisation.