Heart of Darkness

I actually kind of liked the book. The story was rather slow but the way the author wrote it was really cool. I would bet you $10 that most of the students say it was hard to read. The thing is, high school students don't like doing extra work so they won't go to the back of the book and read the notes in the back! The problem with that is that as a reader you won't be able to understand a lot of what is going on. Like Marlow's first speech about Caesar was confusing unless you looked in the back and realized who it was actually about. In the actual speech Marlow just says "he" in the back it says it was Caesar. I didn't just love having to flip to the back either but at least I understood! For this book I did the "learn to write" marking the text strategy. The author loves using metaphors and similes. I believe the first big one he says is the Congo river is like a snake. He compares the two because of the twisting and turning way of the river it's like how a snake slithers (not in a straight path). I think the other kind of way he meant it was the river is vicious like a snake can be when it bites. He uses them in describing everything! He uses elaborate detail in describing the forest like every new patch of forest he is in he describes it differently. Like the forest right when he gets to Africa, "like thinking about an enigma." (simile) and "There it is before you- smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage." (personification). Then 200 miles up the river, to the first base he goes to a place I call "Death Valley" where all the Congo residence go to slowly die. "These moribund shapes were as free as air-and nearly as skinny too." Here he is comparing these dying people to air. They are so little and unhealthy they have almost dwindled away to nothing. Later on in the book he describes his voyage to see Kurtz and he uses simile's and metaphors and comparisons and allusions and personifications left and right. That's what makes this book so difficult to read you have to see the comparisons and see how they connect the two things being compared. The allusions are harder I haven't ever heard of some of them unless I look in the notes and see what the real allusion is. Like "...into the gloomy circle f some Inferno." I never would have known that was an allusion unless the back notes had showed me that he was actually mentioning how "souls suffer punishments appropriate to their sins." The last writing style that I picked up on was when he would make his own prediction, through Marlow's story telling, but then say that it might or only could be true. He kind of rips the rug out from under your feet and is like it might be this but only maybe. "I did not know the motive. Perhaps he was just simply a fine fellow who stuck to his work for his own sake." Here he is talking about how Kurtz got so much Ivory and then went back into the forest and just sent the Ivory down to the river.