Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, achieved classical recognition for its depiction of a humanity’s struggle to reconcile good and evil. From the very opening pages of the Bible man has wrestled with choice, opportunity, propensity and instinct. The knowledge of good and evil has surely caused us to die to simplicity and burdened us with the curse of self-awareness. At first it was a struggle for me to get from page to page because of Conrad’s intricate details. I was not accustomed to his unique writing style and I would often find myself lost in his descriptive language. I soon became frustrated with both the book and myself, which made it even more of a task to read. The devastating transition of Kurtz was the factor that awoke my interest. Kurtz, a highly respectable man full of talent and potential was taken over by the evil that stirred from deep within his soul. I found this change of character fascinating because of my interest in the field of psychology. I find the study of human nature intriguing, which attracted me to Kurtz. Conrad had made me wonder what made someone of Kurtz’s caliber change so drastically.

human being with feelings and a sense of right and wrong. Marlow never actually vocalized a lie. He simply allowed others to continue to believe an untruth. Heart of Darkness is a record of things seen and done, as a man journeys through the Congo and realizes the changes one can undergo when tempted by the darkness. There were so many actual events and facts in the story that made it more an enormity than entertaining. His confrontations as a man are both dangerous and enlightening. Perhaps man's inhumanity to man is his greatest sin. And since the story closes with a lie, maybe Conrad was discovering and analyzing the two aspects of a lie, a lie which does no harm, a white lie or a lie which does nothing to serve any good or help, a black lie. Both, of which, are present in every human soul.

about how he looked and felt. The book keeper did not care for the natives who were suffering less than fifty feet from him.

In Joseph Conrad’s novel, Heart of Darkness, we are shown man insights into the

One interpretation of Heart of Darkness that I have argued formulates the Congo as an altered reality. In this interpretation, Kurtz is a character in contrast to Marlow, a traveller on his own psychedelic journey who does let go of his ego and transcends civilized reality. He began his journey without a defined ego, as one who sees himself as the voice of a civilization, the representative of all Europe, as encompassing a whole. Thus, he can easily lose what little ego he has and become as one with primordial truth and encompass a new whole. He has no belief to define his self, no personal surface-reality to keep him from accepting the jungle—nothing but the words of people. As a character in Marlow’s own story, Kurtz is one who embraces evil by

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