Analysis Of Joseph Conrad s Heart Of Darkness And The ...

In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and V.S. Naipaul’s The Mystic Masseur, the concept of modernism is established through two supporting characters, both of which have only brief physical interactions with our protagonists. Kurtz, from Heart of Darkness, and Mr. Stewart, from The Mystic Masseur, both represent the idea of modernism through both their beliefs and their actions, in a time when modernism was finding its footprints and was viewed differently to those foreign to the movement. Although these novels take place in very different locations, they take place during a similar time period; the early 20th century. The modernist movement â€Å"flourished between 1900 and 1930† and emphasized the idea of deviating from the norm, including the rejection of religious principles, artistic freedom, and looking beneath the surface of man to find where our creative energy comes from, to reinvent how it can be utilized. Both Kurtz and Mr. Stewart may have been deemed as outsiders in their respective stories, but we begin to see their modernistic values and how they come to affect their respective novels over the course of time. Throughout Heart of Darkness, hints of Kurtz’s modernistic values are slowly given to us, but the true revelation comes towards the climax of the novel. Our protagonist realizes that Kurtz has the skulls of dead Africans on the tops of stakes in his compound. Kurtz’s disciple also defends this action, and we begin to get a sense of the