Close Reading on Heart of Darkness

The theme of the novel Heart of Darkness is the avarice, evil of people’s heart, and repression of colonial domination gradually blaspheme the civilization and human nature in Africa.

In the chapter II of the fiction Heart of darkness, the author writes the following:

The word ivory would ring in the air for a while—and on we went again into the silence, along empty reaches, round the still bends, between the high walls of our winding way, reverberating in hollow claps the ponderous beat of the stern-wheel. Trees, trees, millions of trees, massive, immense, running up high; and at their foot, hugging the bank against the stream, crept the little begrimed steamboat, like a sluggish beetle crawling on the floor of a lofty portico. It made you feel very small, very lost, and yet it was not altogether depressing, that feeling. After all, if you were small, the grimy beetle crawled on—which was just what you wanted it to do (Conrad 106).

This paragraph describes a part of the speaker, Marlow’s adventure in Africa. It is mainly about the things that the speaker saw while taking the steamboat on the river. The author uses a various of simile, good verbs, and adjective words to describe thing. His prefect describing techniques of writing create a very vivid scene of the whole environment and let us feel like we can actually experience the adventure. First of all, Conrad uses a few verbs to describe the wind. He writes “reverberating in hollow claps the ponderous beat of the stern-wheel” (Conrad 106). The words “reverberating” and “claps” show the wind hits the boat’s wheel and resounds in the air. The author does not directly say anything about the sound. However, these two verbs do a good work to make us hear the sound while reading the passage.