Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

This book was a very difficult read for me. Conrad had a very extensive vocabulary and I did not understand the ship lingo very well at all. For a small understanding of the book what I did understand was the fact that Conrad was using the river as a way to represent society (a capitalistic society), and every detail of the story had some sort of heirarchy like the deck hands who have a captain down to slaves, and how every one seemed to look up to Kurtz. The story also seemed capitalistic oriented because the people at the bottom of the ladder always seemed to want to work up to the top of the ladder (who was Kurtz) and the people at the top of the ladder would knock down others coming to meet up with them. No matter how horribly seck Kurtz was he did not want to leave his position in the jungle finding ivory.

I annotated this book by using the writing style as a way to better my writing skills as well. I need to work on extending my vocab in my writing. I also liked how the writing style was different in this book; this book was a story within a story. Conrad used Marlow and the deck hand as the opening story and then developed another story using Marlow's capability to tell stories very well. I liked how the author would randomly jump from Marlow's story to the deck hand and crew waiting to set off into "the heart of darkness" or also known as the river. I also want to add into my writing skills the ability to make objects with supposidly no meaning to them have symbolism to the bigger picture.