Symbolism in The Heart of Darkness

Impressionism

-Watt suggests that Heart of Darkness is impressionist because it asserts the "bounded and ambiguous nature of individual understanding." This understanding is inward looking and based on experience; therefore, the narrative can be described as subjective moral impressionism.

-Marlow assumes reality is private and individual and that no other man can know what they are actually seeing.

-His text is also impressionist because of his methods of approaching visual descriptions. He is concerned with individual sense to give his text meaning. This technique is one of his innovations in Heart of Darkness.

-An example Conrad's impressionism is his use of fog and its relation to the story. The narrator established that Marlow's story would not be centered on the meaning, instead, its meaning will not be fully visible and possible unnoticed like "the presence of dust particles and water vapor in a pace that normally looks dark and void.

-However, Conrad probably was not an impressionist, because his tastes in music and painting were distinctly old-fashioned, and he apparently disliked Van Gogh. Conrad thought that impressionism was strictly concerned with visual appearances.

Symbolism

- Conrad had many letter's suggesting that he shared symbolic references of knowledge and expression with French Symbolists.

-Conrad wanted to make Heart of Darkness mostly straightforward to give "a true impression," but he connected the world of the ship to the greater world.

- Though his work is straightforward in meaning, he wanted the the novella to have wider and general implications; therefore the piece itself is symbolic as a whole/

- The symbolic meaning of events has a structure, rather than being strictly illustrative

- The title brings together the meaning of the novella. It is a combination of "inorganic darkness" containing an "organic center of life and feeling." It also suggests the notion of the good heart coming to control the evil darkness, but the the symbols of heart and darkness can not necessarily be clearly assigned.