The Archetypes In Joseph Conrad's Heart Of Darkness

There are a few, core archetypes which can be found in all traditional legends and folktales: a strong, noble hero, a difficult obstacle to overcome and a damsel-in-distress to save. While Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” is no exception to these rules, an even deeper meaning is unveiled when analyzing the piece using Jungian archetypes. Conrad’s novella is a subtle but scathing criticism of British society and imperialism through the eyes of an experienced seadog, Marlow, and the horrors he faced when he was sent to work in the heart of the Congo. But underneath Conrad’s tale of adventure and worlds unknown, a set of collective ideas as old as time are prevalent through Conrad’s characters and themes. Through the mythological lense and using the Jungian archetypes, “Heart of Darkness” can be broken down and …show more content…
The shadow archetype in “Heart of Darkness” is shown in the Congolese natives. The natives which Marlow encounters are seen as uncivilized savages who listened to their most base desires and instincts without rational thought; this was very much frowned upon by the English people, being the “civilized” people they were. Even the Congo itself represents a facet of the shadow archetype. For Marlow, “going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth” (55 Conrad); in essence, this primordial river and the native beasts which lived on this land are seen as the characteristics and the traits of a time long, long ago, no longer accepted by society. An interesting thing to note is that, while the European pilgrims fit the archetype of the respectable persona, the character of Kurtz as a whole and Marlow’s “faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise [the natives]” (60 Conrad), shows that Jung’s archetypes are fluid and one character can have characteristics of multiple Jungian archetypes at different parts in their

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The Archetypes In Joseph Conrad's Heart Of Darkness

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