MLA

I couldn't figure out how to cite the Freud thing because I don't know very much about the document itself. But, here are the rest of the things I am citing.

Murfin, Ross C. Heart of Darkness: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989. Print.

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. 1902. Charlottesville: Feedbooks,  2012. E-book.

Martel, Yann. Life of Pi. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 2001.

Freud and Conrad conclusion

Freud and Conrad exemplified the phenomenon known as synchronicity: they thought of the same intellectual idea at the same time, but completely separated from each other. They both saw a darkness at the core of all men that manifested itself in the way people treat each other. Freud explained this darkness using psychology. He said that people’s immoral and irrational desires are repressed into the unconscious where they control our behaviors and make us want to harm others, and that we should understand and accept this dark unconscious. Conrad, in literary fashion, says that the darkness is man’s natural tendency towards evil and that we should hide ourselves from it because it is disheartening. However, both Freud and Conrad agreed that all men have a heart of darkness. The reader, then, is left with a choice: choose to believe that men are innately evil or that men are innately good. Or, as Yann Martel put it “Which is the better story, the story with animals or the story without animals?” (Martel, 317).

freud and conrad body paragraph 3

Due to their different perspectives, Freud and Conrad differed in their opinion(s?) as to what humanity should do with the knowledge of their inner darkness: Freud says we should accept it and Conrad says we should lie to ourselves. When talking about Kurtz’s legacy, Marlow says, “it was something to at least have a choice of nightmares” (Conrad, 76). Marlow is referring to his choice between being hated by his crew for believing Kurtz was good or his benefit to the company and living with the knowledge that Kurtz was a horrendous man. By saying this, Conrad (through Marlow) offers a choice: either accept and know the atrocities of colonized Africa, or live a privileged life, hoping that man is naturally good. Freud thinks we should accept the darkness of man. When talking about redistribution of wealth/equality/injustice he says, “nature began the injustice by the highly unequal way in which she endows individuals physically and mentally, for which there is no help” (Freud, 4?). Essentially, Freud is saying that people are naturally unequal, and men will inevitably exploit those inequalities because of their innate unconscious desires. Furthermore, mankind needs to know and accept the darkness as a part of psychology and not avoid it. Conrad has the opposite view. At the end of the book, Marlow lies to Kurtz’s fiancé, saying that his last words were her name, as opposed to “The horror! The horror!” (how do I cite?). Marlow wants the innocent fiancé to live her life thinking that Kurtz was a good man and that he did good things unto others. This is symbolic of what Conrad thinks mankind should do with the knowledge of the darkness: repress (suppress?) it under lies. Truly knowing the darkness in man would suck out people’s hope in humanity (the basis of most literary works). Freud’s and Conrad’s intellectual backgrounds gave them differing views on how men should deal with the darkness in them.

freud and conrad body paragraph 2

Freud and Conrad argue that the “darkness” at the heart of men is evil by nature: Freud says that the unconscious mind is filled with desires to do unspeakable things unto others, and Conrad uses his book to showcase the heinous behaviors that man’s darkness leads him to do.

Freud argues, in Civilization and its Discontents, that man naturally seeks to do harm unto his fellow man because of the id, and civilization is just a futile attempt to stop it. Freud describes the results of unconscious desires as such: “[Men’s] neighbor is to them not only a possible helper or sexual object, but also a temptation to them to gratify their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without recompense, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him” (Freud, 1). For Freud, the unconscious makes men want to kill, rape, torture, and exploit each other to fulfill desires of which they are not consciously aware. This is a true darkness at the heart of man. The similarity between this list of uses of other men is bafflingly similar to Conrad’s descriptions of white men’s treatment of the Africans. For example, Marlow sees six emaciated, despondent, mentally empty African men chained together, walking in single-file up a hill, followed by a content white man carrying a gun (18-20). These men are not working for pay, food, or their families. All of that has been taken away from them. The white men have come and gratified their aggressiveness, exploited, raped, stole from, humiliated, tortured and killed the Africans: the darkness/ unconscious at work. Kurtz, the representation of unrestrained darkness, does equally heinous things to local tribes in trying to get ivory. “’To speak plainly, he raided the country,’ I said. He nodded. ‘Not alone, surely!’… ‘Kurtz got the tribe to follow him’” (Conrad, 68). Kurtz pitted tribes against each other, enslaved them, stole from them, tortured, and killed them, all in pursuit of personal gain. This exemplification of the “darkness” perfectly parallels Freud’s description of unconscious desires and demonstrates that the “unconscious” and the “darkness” driving men are composed of the same evils. In this way, Freud and Conrad’s theories about the malevolent core of all men are the same, just from different perspectives.

freud and conrad body paragraph 1

As Ross Murfin aptly points out in Heart of Darkness: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism, Conrad’s “darkness” and Freud’s “unconscious” are one and the same. Murfin’s book is about how authors use their books to demonstrate the phenomena that psychoanalysts use to understand psychology. This connection does not stop with Conrad and Freud. “Conrad, Freud’s contemporary, [was] a writer who meant by “darkness” what Freud meant by “unconscious” and who, like Freud, believed human beings to be largely motivated by the irrational side of the mind” (Murfin, 122). As Murfin says, Conrad and Freud talk about the same irrational and immoral core of mankind; they just have different names for it. The parallel nature of Freud’s unconscious and Conrad’s darkness becomes strikingly similar when one reads their two main works. The last line of Heart of Darkness reads: “the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness” (Conrad, 93). In this quote the Thames (the “waterway”), the heart of England’s empire, is used to represent the hearts of all men, the clouds are the shroud of unconsciousness preventing our moral “god” from seeing the true darkness of man (England), and the “immense darkness” is the evil that all men eventually come to. As the last line of the book, this quote has the responsibility of driving the books central message: the hearts of men inevitably drift towards evil and because men are unaware of it, there is nothing they can do to stop it. This message is strikingly similar to the unconscious Freud describes which drives all conscious behaviors. When talking man’s about the cruel, selfish violent instincts that communism naïvely seeks to eliminate by means of total equality, Freud lays out the nature of the unconscious. “This instinct did not arise as the result of property; it reigned almost supreme in primitive times when possessions were still extremely scanty… it is at the bottom of all the relation of affection and love between human beings” (Freud, 3). Freud says, here, that our unconscious instincts to steal, harm, fornicate, and covet are innate and control every relationship and action we have—even love. Conrad and Freud saw at the core of men unknown desires that drive them to do evil things and control every aspect of their lives. Conrad called it darkness and Freud called it the unconscious id.

intro paragraph

In the early 1900’s, two brilliant men wrote about the internal drives of men. Sigmund Freud saw a dark, natural unconscious at the heart of man that drives our conscious behaviors. Joseph Conrad saw an evil within every man that makes us treat each other horribly. Both Freud and Conrad wrote about the same darkness at the core of men that drives their behaviors and enslaves them to their desires: Freud from a psychological perspective and Conrad from a literary perspective.

this is VERY rough, i am going to edit this like crazy.