Heart of Darkness

ISBN: E100000000526 出版年：2006 页码： Conrad, Joseph, 1857-1924 Project Gutenberg

Scholars have disagreed about Joseph Conrad’s work for more than a century. He has been broadly interpreted as both a moral relativist and a moralist. This chapter uses a combination of personality psychology, evolutionary literary theory, and biographical research to explain the contrasting impressions. Conrad lived during a time when intellectuals first faced the psychological challenges of Darwinian evolution. Because of his imaginative neuroticism and extreme conscientiousness, he was particularly disturbed by the revelation that nature is amoral. But he responded with unusual fortitude. He imagined himself as a sympathetic observer of the amoral cosmos, dedicated to simple moral values that he saw as part of human nature. Both his seeming moral relativism and his seeming moralism were thus naturalistic. He neither imposed human morality on the natural world nor discarded morality from human nature. Conrad’s most famous work, Heart of Darkness, enacts his remarkable balance between human psychological needs and non-mythological reality. It is an allegory of facing amoral nature, providing mythic texture for the post-Darwinian world.