journeyhod Spiritual Journey in Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness Essa

Spiritual Journey in Heart of Darkness Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad may be a narrative about colonisation, revealing its drawbacks and corruption, but it may also be understood as a journey into the depths of ones psyche, if taken at a symbolic level. At the beginning of the novel the reader is informed that Marlow is not typical, that he, contrary to stay-at-home-minded seamen, is a wanderer. He has no home, in a psychological sense of the word. He simply follows the sea. This may evoke an interpretation that the man is disturbed, that he attempts to find out about the secrets of his soul, to puzzle to know himself. Since boyhood he had been interested in unexplored lands and especially in a long winding snake-like river with the head in the sea and the tail plunging deeply into the land, which, as Marlow admits, charmed him. This image resembles a map of a journey from the dark lands of the soul, the unconstrained, uncivilised core, which may be called a Freudian Id, towar ds light, that is Superego. Marlow desires to follow this direction in the opposite di...