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

The Cosmogonic Cycle in Heart of Darkness  Ã‚   The short novel Heart of Darkness tells a story just like any other heroic myth, except better. This novel rewards an educated reader. Many find the work 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 most noticeable is the flaw in the Cosmogony Cycle. This cycle is an integral part of every hero’s 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 protagonist’s journey, the travel into the underworld, confronting the father figure, meeting, and saving, a female prisoner, then the journey back into the conscious. A guide is there to lead the hero. He generally is a man or woman who has been on a similar journey and knows the pitfalls where the hero may f all. Without this figure in Marlow’s 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 protagonist’s 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 Conrad’s caliber, does not place superfluous scenes, words, 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 of Marlow’s 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 hadn’t 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 man’s soul to escape the forest.