Doe 1<\/p>\n
The Evil Within: Human Nature in Heart of Darkness, Lord of the Flies, and The Great Gatsby<\/p>\n
Jane Doe<\/p>\n
English 101<\/p>\n
Dr. Harold Epps October 12, 2012<\/p>\n
Doe 2<\/p>\n
Although they represent three very different time periods, Joseph Conrad\u2019s Heart of<\/p>\n
Darkness, William Golding\u2019s Lord of the Flies, and F. Scott Fitzgerald\u2019s The Great Gatsby all address the same fundamental issue: what truly lies in the hearts of men? Heart of Darkness examines this question through the disintegration of the individual mind in the wilds of the Congo, while Lord of the Flies shows the breakdown of social norms among school children stranded on an island. In The Great Gatsby, though, no one is sent out into the wilderness. In fact, the main characters live a seemingly charmed, upper-class life, but nonetheless the main characters prove themselves to be just as vicious as the men who lose themselves in the jungle. All three novels present the human creature as vicious and self-absorbed and warn the reader that violence, insanity, and man\u2019s true animal nature are ever-present just below the surface in our supposed civilization.<\/p>\n
In Conrad\u2019s work, nature quickly works to strip away the illusion of civilization and safety that the explorer Marlow brings with him to the jungle. In the wilderness of his company’s field station, Marlow interprets the Manager’s gesture toward \u201cthe forest, the creek, the mud, the river\u201d by saying that it offers \u201ca treacherous appeal to the lurking death, to the hidden evil, to the profound darkness of its heart.\u201d (35) The evil that haunts Marlow and his story comes from death, the most fundamental fact of nature. What is hidden by the trappings of London life is laid bare by the forest, the mud, and the river. It is a truth that cannot be escaped. Marlow feels this keenly when he finally lands at Kurtz’s camp, as far from civilization as he will ever be. He declares that \u201c never, never before, did this land, this river, this jungle, the very arch of this blazing sky, appear to me so hopeless and so dark, so impenetrable to human thought, so pitiless to human weakness.\u201d (55) Stripped down to its essence, the wilderness Marlow finds in Africa cares not one bit about human morals, ideas, or existence. Exposing \u201cthe human ego, unshielded by civilization and its self-contents, to a world of savagery presumed to be far beneath it [\u2026] is to come up against the innate\u201d (Stewart, 319), and in Conrad\u2019s story, the innate is truly horrifying. Surrounded by an indifference to which the they are wholly unaccustomed, the Europeans in the story lose the morals and ideals that they feel make them human.<\/p>\n
It is this loss that Marlow fears. He finds the smell of the damp earth to be \u201can intolerable weight oppressing [his] breast,\u201d intimating \u201cthe unseen presence of victorious corruption, the darkness of an impenetrable night.\u201d (62) The wilderness is not passive its quest to undo mankind, and Marlow can feel this animosity as a weight. He has seen this corruption in Kurtz and is afraid that he, too, will be brought face-to-face with whatever it is that lurks just out of his sight, and so lose something of himself. He declares Kurtz’s final words to be \u201ca moment of triumph for the wilderness, an invading and vengeful rush.\u201d (72) Kurtz let the unspeakable in nature take hold of him, and when the wilderness rushed in, all civilized human thought was gone. And something worse than savagery had taken its place. Of the severed heads Kurtz has spiked in front of his house, Marlow says they are \u201conly a savage sight, while I seemed at one bound to have been transported into some lightless region of subtle horrors, where pure, uncomplicated savagery was a positive.\u201d (58) Any animal in nature, he is saying, can kill. It is a special kind of horror for a formerly civilized man to lose himself to blood and power and hidden evils. The children of Golding\u2019s Lord of the Flies are similarly stripped of their \u201ccivilized\u201d selves when they are marooned on an island with no supervision and no way off. At first they are able to maintain a semblance of order: they elect leaders and organize themselves around the conch shell that represents their ersatz civilization. In their minds, the boys still cling to their old ways:<\/p>\n
Doe 3<\/p>\n
\u201cRoger gathered a handful of stones and began to throw them. Yet there was a space round<\/p>\n
Henry [\u2026] into which he dare not throw. Here, invisible yet strong, was the taboo of the old life. Round the squatting child was the protection of parents and school and policemen and the law\u201d<\/p>\n
(16). Very quickly, though, the boys descend into chaos and violence. The images of parents and policeman fade from their minds and are replaced by shadowy island beasts and bloodlust. In a short time they go from being afraid to throw rocks to brutally murdering their classmates.<\/p>\n
Simon, the most thoughtful of the boys, wants to blame the wilds of the island for their savagery, but eventually comes to the realization that \u201cthe beast\u201d they\u2019ve been hunting is actually their own human nature. The Lord of the Flies, a severed pig\u2019s head, says to him \u201cfancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill! . . . You knew, didn\u2019t you? I\u2019m part of you? Close, close, close! I\u2019m the reason why it\u2019s no go? Why things are the way they are?\u201d (113). There was no way the boys would be able to escape the suffering they created, because they carry that animal nature within themselves. For Golding, \u201cevil is innate in man [\u2026] and those, therefore, who look to political and social systems detached from this real nature of man are the victims of a terrible, self-destructive illusion\u201d (Spitz, 29). Their ad-hoc system of government stood no chance of surviving the overwhelming need for violence and control that was hiding inside each boy.<\/p>\n
In contrast to these men and boys who find their true nature in the wilderness, the<\/p>\n
characters in The Great Gatsby let their selfishness, violence, and greed run free right in the<\/p>\n
middle of the most civilized of settings. The characters hide behind their money, dancing at<\/p>\n
lavish, champagne-filled parties that mean nothing and that serve only to distract them from<\/p>\n
their sorrows. The civilized world leaves them unfulfilled: a guest tells Nick \u201cyou see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me\u201d (36). Despite the wealth and beauty around him, Nick himself feels \u201coppressed and uneasy\u201d at Gatsby\u2019s parties because he can see they provide only the illusion of real human interaction (Harvey, 16). Everyone is pretending to be civilized and carefree when really they are anything but.<\/p>\n
Later in the novel, this ennui and forced ease leads to death, when Daisy Buchanan, a rich New Yorker who should represent the virtues of society, runs down a woman with her car. Nick says of Daisy and her husband Tom \u201cThey were careless people [\u2026] they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made\u201d (156). For Fitzgerald, civilization does little to hide man\u2019s true nature, and while the book\u2019s narrator struggles to overcome his failings, the other characters float along unaware of their hideousness, insulated by the belief that their money and their possessions make them good people. But, ultimately, even the trappings of civilized society can\u2019t mask man\u2019s true, horrible nature. The main characters of Heart of Darkness, Lord of the Flies, and The Great Gatsby all start their stories believing themselves to be safe in a world of civilized rules and learned men. But as the novels progress, Marlow, Piggy, and Nick are horrified as they watch the world around them go mad with violence and greed. Each witnesses men turning to evil, but it\u2019s not just the murder and selfishness that they find so terrible\u2014it\u2019s also the fact that this behavior comes so easily. Each novel shows its characters slipping of the mask of civility quickly and completely, revealing just how close to the surface we all hide our savagery.<\/p>\n
Doe 4<\/p>\n
Works Cited<\/p>\n
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. 3rd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1988. Print. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. 1925. New York: Scribner, 2004. Print. Golding, William. Lord of the Flies. New York: Perigee, 1959. Print.<\/p>\n
Harvey, WJ. \u201cTheme and Texture in The Great Gatsby.\u201d English Studies 38.1 (1957): 12-20. Web.<\/p>\n
11 Oct. 2012<\/p>\n
Spitz, David. \u201cAn Interpretation of Golding\u2019s Lord of the Flies.\u201d The Antioch Review 30.1 (1970): 21-<\/p>\n
33. Web. 11 Oct. 2012<\/p>\n
Stewart, Garrett. \u201cLying as Dying in The Heart of Darkness.\u201d PMLA 95.3 (1980): 319-331. Web. 11 Oct. 2012<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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