The Earliest Beginning of the World

The Earliest Beginning of the World

  • Submitted By: vanitycharm
  • Date Submitted: 01/30/2010 10:39 PM
  • Category: English
  • Words: 616
  • Page: 3
  • Views: 670

This passage is the moment when Marlow and the pilgrims are traveling up the river in the steamboat to meet Kurtz at the inner station. During this journey, Conrad uses descriptive language and writing style to provoke a certain type of mood in the readers. The description and diction of the passage create emptiness, stillness and gloomy atmosphere that furthermore create a delusional aspect of the forest. The use of first person narrative allows the readers to get involve with narrator and the interaction between the narrator and readers provoke a stronger mood within the readers mind. Conrad also uses other literary devices such a personification, imagery and repetition in construction of the placid atmosphere.
Since from the first sentence, Conrad reflects imagery of the “earliest beginnings of the world” to present idea of vast emptiness of immobility. Conrad refers to this because in the beginning of the world, there was nothing much on the world. Only the natural stillness was part of the infant world. Using the fragmented sentence “An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest”, Conrad explicitly describes the setting. The use of fragmented sentence gives the readers the idea that there were only three descriptions can be made out be the setting and there was nothing more to the setting. Both of the ideas of the “earliest beginnings of the world” and the short fragmented sentence create the mood of emptiness.
The sentence “The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish.” lacks the conjunction “and”. This can be accounted that there are more description to the air. It can be assumed that Conrad allowing the readers to generate more idea about the “air” and the words that have negative connotation. The sentence “There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine.” reveals an irony. In normal situation, the sunlight is supposed bring to happiness and bright atmosphere to the people. In this context, the “the brilliance of sunshine” is just in passive...

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