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: This is fun. I think it is most legitimate to compare and contrast Marlow with the likes of, say, Gatsby and Gulliver. To a degree, because it helps us think about what it means to be human, what a journey is and how it works on the human soul or the psyche. : But how far can we go with these comparisons, and where are the places to rush in headlong and delve deeply, and where are the places more treacherous and speculative that we should tread in more cautiously and carefully? Well, we won't know until we try some out and see for ourselves, hmmm? But we can take Marlow's experience as a cautionary note; and we can legitimately presume that Conrad's prose is decidedly lurid, deceptive, and misleading. So, here we go. Read further at your own peril. : OK, we have the Arthurian legends, the Grail Quest if you please, which for long has indeed been the very essence of Western spirituality, perhaps our whole Weltanschauung. (I mean, why has the "Wasteland" been the dominating force in English poetry oh these long years? And doesn't the true poet rise out of the wasteland, the wounded healer?) Now, in HofD, we have the Flower of the West, the Grail knight, and the Flower of the East, the lotus Buddha -- one rising out of the other in the most amazing legerdemain of cthonic (dark, underground) journeying I have ever seen -- so that Marlow becomes both enlightened and dis-illusioned, not cynically and darkly, but as the buddha would. : Then we have the journey, a kind of epic. We can look at other epics as well: Milton's Paradise Lost for a kind of Pandemonium in the congo-like land, for a Kurtz who would rather "reign in hell than serve in heaven," and for the flabby-devil demon of hypocrisy in the dark ivory lord Kurtz and all the "pilgrims" who Marlow encounters. These great lines seem so relevant here: "So spake the false dissembler unperceiv'd. / For neither man nor angel can discern/ Hypocrisy, the only evil that walks/ Invisible, except to God alone." And of course we have the three norn-like figures at the gates of hell, wearing black and knitting with black yarn. : Then it might also be possible to take a Dantesque view of the journey, seeing it as a kind of "divine comedy," which takes the edge off the tragic Greek or Roman aspects of Kurtz and his drama, which are rendered mostly through hearsay anyway. It's as if Marlow descends through ever-darkening more hellish "circles" until he turns back toward the light, and enlightenment, with the dying Kurtz in his boat. : That takes us to Vergil and the "Aeneid." And, remember, Vergil was Dante's guide, and he was Roman. And where does Marlow begin his story but with the Romans and Julius Caesar. The Roman aspects of HofD seem particulary striking to me, as opposed to the Greek, and yet much influenced by the Greek. And who can say but that Kurtz was perhaps a kind of "tragic hero" in the Aristotelian sense, and yet that is not the major thrust of the novel, which is Marlow's journey through the cthonic land, indeed through his own cthonic heart and soul, with Kurtz as the opposing heart and soul whereby Marlow can see his own. : So, in the tragic Greek sense, Kurtz could be seen as the "hero," but in the epic journey, in the divine comedy sense, Marlow is the "hero." : Now you can take these ideas and do your own thinking. Which make sense and which seem to stretch too far? Which would you like to pursue, embellish, and elaborate your thinking on? It may be perilous, but it's so much fun.

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