Heart of Darkness Themes RapertAP Lit Instructions Jot

Heart of Darkness Themes Rapert/AP Lit

Instructions • Jot down each theme • Justify each w/3 pieces of evidence or quotes from the book

• Violence and cruelty, greed and lust, loneliness and perversion-moral corruption, lies at the heart of all men. • Violence and cruelty result when law is absent and man allows himself to be ruled by his own brutal passions • One must discover and then control his unconscious or most base self, otherwise he shall fall into chaos.

• Colonizers subjugate all nonwhite races, and are therefore the devils and the brutes • In order to subjugate the land lesser humans, man must sacrifice his own humanity, conscience, and reason, thus, ironically, becoming the very essence of savagery. • A certain group of mankind feels it their innate right to pillage both nature and man • Civilized man plays god to both the earth and the less civilized men and hides atrocities within the deception of a “noble cause”

• Without internal or external restraints, man goes mad. – In isolation and silence, one must face himself…and to most the reflection is maddening. • Modern man is a parasite to nature, an “invasion” • We are all base and animalistic, and this is beyond laws of society and morals…once we were ruled by nature and a part of nature, which is moral-less, and it is a state to which, however enlightened we may be, we can easily slip back into.