Richard's review of Conrad's Heart of Darkness & The Secret Sharer (original) (raw)

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Richard's Reviews > Conrad's Heart of Darkness & The Secret Sharer

Conrad's Heart of Darkness & The Secret Sharer (Cliffs Notes)
by

Very useful while reading both stories. But sometimes I really have trouble swallowing this symbolic stuff. I mean (paraphrasing some stuff on The Secret Sharer):

Leggatt's hair is black and came out of the water. And the scorpion died in black ink. So the scorpion represents Leggatt and tells us that Leggatt is violent and nasty, just like the scorpion.

Yeah, right. Some of the other stuff I can believe, but how much of this is what the author really intended, and how much is the critic/analyst simply making up?

Someday, someone reviewing Tom Clancy's oeuvre will state:

The thug in this scene is explicitly using hollow-point bullets, which represent his "empty headed" lack of education and thus his unimaginative response to the situation, and also foreshadows the death of the politician a chapter later in the meteorite crater (or, as T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men would phrase it: "under the twinkle of a fading star"). Recall Clancy's political prejudices: he notoriously believed that all politicians are stuffed shirts, ergo hollow!

Really, I love Cliff's Notes, because they point out stuff I wouldn't have thought of otherwise. But ya gotta take this stuff with a grain of salt.

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Reading Progress

January 21, 2009 – Shelved

March 26, 2009 –Finished Reading

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