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 and 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.