Heart of Darkness Book Review

Heart of Darkness is a good book with an important theme that is made utterly unreadable due to the author's unique writing style. The story about Marlow's search for Kurtz could have been as action-packed and impressive as Indiana Jones and Literally Anything But the Crystal Skull if it had been written in a different way. However, it was not meant to be an action-packed, explosion-filled adventure movie with heart-stopping action and intense car chases. The book's style is slow and feels muggy to read; this was intentional. Joseph Conrad used slow pacing, with more linking verbs than action verbs with the goal of making it seem slow. He uses so much symbolism that googling every paragraph is basically the only way to understand all of it. However, Heart of Darkness was not MEANT to be read quickly; it wasn't meant to be actin-packed and interesting. Joseph Conrad wanted to force the reader to take his time to read the novel so that his point could truly sink in. The book is extraordinarily well-written and overall excellent when viewed from the proper angle. Unsurprisingly due to the nature of the curriculum of an Honors English class, the book is still relevant to modern times. One nation taking advantage of the resources of another, while accomplished with different methods, is still a commonplace event in our time. The treatment of the people living in multiple Middle Eastern countries by the United States, and many other countries, for oil is likely the best example of this issue today. However, while the book is still relevant, the style it was written in is no longer as effective as it once was. The mistreatment of the people in the Congo was done in an extremely noticeable manner, but in more recent years, the method has changed to be done with cloak and dagger. Therefore, the methods used to expose these actions must change as well. People nowadays are more focused on efficiency than perfection. Whether this is a positive or negative change is irrelevant in this issue; it is a change that happened and must be accounted for. A novel written in such a way that it must be read slowly with research just to understand it is no longer able to be as impactful as it once was.  Just as slideshows have been made largely obsolete by movies, slow moving books are no longer considered relevant in this time period. So, while Heart of Darkness remains a fantastic novel, it is in desperate need of a successor, another novel written in a style that people in this time period will want to read. People and their ideas change with time, and if a book doesn't keep with the times it and its ideas will eventually be forgotten.