Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness

"Horror, Horror!"


"Proving yet again that doing a concept first will get you immortalized, while doing it WELL will make you an unknown and forgotten writer at best, I also learned that in Conrad's time, people could drone on and on with metaphors and it wasn't considered cliched, but 'art.' I blame this book and others like it for some of the most painful literature created by students and professional writers alike.

It was like raking my fingernails across a chalkboard while breathing in a pail of flaming cat hair and drinking spoiled milk, meanwhile Conrad is screaming DARKNESS DARKNESS OOOH LOOK AT MY METAPHOR ABOUT THE DARKNESSSSSSSSSSS like a fucking goth on a loudspeaker."


"How significant is Joseph Conrad if his biggest dead guy claim to fame is, 'More high schoolers didn't read my book than didn't read yours!'?"


"Beware this book!!!! It was the worst book ever!!! Almost as worst and Twilight..."


"I can understand how this book could have been relevant in its day, but now that the horrors of imperialism have been brought to light, I'm not sure why professors insist we continue to read this."


"A journey to the heart of darkness, which is something that really just doesn't appeal to me. I don't like the names of the characters, the feel of the place, the crimes of the characters etc. This is just one book that I don't see myself in. Yes, that sounds selfish, I know. But that's just me."


"Conrad is way too in love with colons, semi-colons, commas, and dashes."


"Bottom line.....this book was just too wordy for me. I skipped half of it because I'm either too dumb or too impatient to wade through the verbal quagmire and figure out the author's deeper meanings. I'm not in high school English anymore and I have better things to do."


"Possibly the stupidest and most useless book I have ever set my hands on. I’ve never read any book whose each page makes me want to shoot myself, till now. Without all the metaphors and figures of speech, the book would be a quarter of its original size. I like the use of figurative language and all, but not when it’s used in an excess that would make me mentally incapable of anything after the first read. I read it as fast I could just so I could get rid of it. I dream of burning it. I read pages and pages and had no idea what the hell was going on. I specifically despise the author’s idea of putting a story in a story and how 99.9% of the book is a quotation. I don’t give a shit how much it influenced English literature or whatever.

They seriously should have put a 'CAUTION: Big words that will waste many hours of your life inside.' sticker on the cover for people like me."


"This was just bad writing from a bad writer conforming to the bad views of his time."


"Perhaps I'm being ridiculous and have no future as an English major if I can't appreciate this novel, but I did not like it whatsoever. The lack of paragraph breaks and the rambling narration style that was some strange jumble between autobiography, flashback, and stream-of-consciousness were incredibly frustrating. There was little to no character development and the fact that only two of the characters had names made things rather confusing at times."


"nice try, joseph. NOT."


"TOO MUCH BIG VOCAB WORDS."


"I felt so overwhelmed with the overflowing symbolism. Seriously, why do writers have to use so much of this. Just say what you mean and get on with it! If this is what great writing used to be, no wonder my generation didn't read as much as those today."


"The ways in which i hate this book are too numerous and hellish to list but i will say that it was one giant pain in the @$$ to read. There is no such thing as chronological order for Marlow and the constant aggravation of trying to decipher what the H E double hockey sticks was going on between the bouts of painfully over descriptive narrative was too much for me to take."


"The first thing that irritated me about Heart of Darkness is the whole 'story within a story' thing. The problem with that is that there is no outside story - it's just a bunch of guys sitting on a boat and Marlow tells them the main story. Utterly pointless, except as a method for Conrad to open every paragraph with quotation marks, throwing in some irrelevant comment to the audience every now and then. I could have easily done without the outer framework if it meant less agonizing text. In fact, not only was it expendable, this style was outright bad, as it constantly reminded the reader that he was being told a story, rather than allowing him to become immersed in it."


"Its very confusing because its a story within a story which is super hard to understand.I just dont like the english style writing period."


"After watching a few interviews with well-established black authors I learned how this book is just a half-assed attempt to make up sorry excuses for imperialism. It makes anyone who reads it sympathize with the oppressor and I just can't fall back on that slippery slope of brainwashing."


"Not a great book. Ok, the imagery is beautiful, but it's so outdated it's very hard to get lost in the book. I never really believed the story could happen and that just made it all quite boring."


"I know that this is a classic piece of literature, but I simply could not stand this book. Everything is archetypal, so every single little color, action, etc. in this book has a meaning. While I've had these archetypes drilled into my head since 8th grade, I did not like the fact that after every page, I had to go back through to figure out exactly what the author meant in order to understand the book."


"Yet another work of literature forced upon students which basically calls all of our ancestors pigs while criticizing colonialism and imperialism, conveniently forgetting that without either of these we would not have a country let alone the freedom to bash things like colonialism and imperialism."


"I absolutely, postively HATED this book. I was an English major in college, so I love reading. I absolutely loathed this book. It took me considerable effort to read this book and it probably took me just as long to read, to, let's say, a book 5 times as long."