Looking Into the Heart of Dark, the Silence (Od' Und Leer Das Meer)

"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being."
-Carl Jung

Due to various time constraints, this particular blog won't be as long as mine normally are, but I still have some good stuff to say. I know that the students of Brit Lit II are currently reading Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and if you'll give me two seconds to talk about it I'll tell you it's one of my favorite books. Naturally, I've noticed some interesting parallels between that and Shusaku Endo's Silence. For starters, both protagonists, Marlowe and Rodrigues, choose to travel by water into a dangerous and hostile foreign land and rescue a former collegue that may have failed his duties and gone rogue (Kurtz and Ferriera). Their fellow seamen are strange and unsavory, and the actual waterway is dark, winding, and filled with militaristic dangers. There is a station in between their starting and ending points, where they encounter complications. There is an oppressive "ideal" regime (British King/Japanese Shogun) and the subservient savages that are acually quite misunderstood and underestimated(Congo natives/Japanese serfs). In HoD, Kurtz actually did turn rogue and became arguably more savage than the Congoese people he manipulated. I don't know if the same but opposite fate will be true of Father Ferriera, though, but I look forward to finding out.

Thank you for reading, I hope it was informative! Feel free to comment as you please, I commented on Susan Berner's The Second Phase: Relative Apathy.