Conrad's style in Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad
(1857-1924), was a novelist whose texts have been admired for almost a century.
He is highly recognized by many other literature authors and readers because of
the style and word choice in his stories. One of the most famous books he has
ever made is Heart of
Darkness, a story full of
adventure that allows the reader an imaginary journey to the Congo. Conrad’s
style in this story is mostly based on hyponyms, words of more specific meaning
than a general or superordinate term applicable to it.
The firt chapter of
the story starts with many descriptions about Marlow’s, the main character,
surroundings. Conrad is environmentally descriptive, in comparison with Edgar
Allan Poe, who uses a lot of descriptions in the characters’s aspect,
temperament or thoughts. These descriptions can be expressed with the use of
hyponyms, because they create a text that appears semantically richer and with
more meaning compressed into each clause.
For example, in Heart of Darkness, Conrad constantly
mentions the word “darkness”, and it can be related with different aspects of
the story, in other words, this witty author says a lot in just a word. Through
my own interpetation of the word “darkness”, I realized that it is written in
different scenarios of the story but it can allude to the discrimination
suffered by the Africans or to the fear of Marlow of experimenting a whole new
adventure.
Summarizing, Joseph Conrad uses hyponyms to give each
sentence much more information to the reader, even though each sententence only
uses a certain number of terms and has no additional words. Hyponyms allows the
reader to have a more general interpretation of Conrad’s story.
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