On the Conradian Ethical Knots as Partly Untied, and the Human Factor as Partly Revealed in Heart of Darkness

Abstract

Abstract: “Ethical knots” and “the human factor” are two significant terms from the theoretical framework of ethical literary criticism constructed by Professor Nie Zhenzhao. The former vividly demonstrates the complexity of ethical paradoxes and the difficulty of ethical choices; the latter indicates an abstraction, epitomizing in a nutshell the key qualities and spiritual essentials that make man truly human. In our process of re-reading Heart of Darkness, a canonical novella by Joseph Conrad, these two viewpoints may function to interact with each other, and generate fresh ethical meanings. By means of association, confrontation, concretization, interiorization, and rationalization, in his novella, Conrad partly unties its ethical knots, and partly reveals the human factor embedded in them, and meanwhile he uses the method of ambiguation to suggest the multivalence and profundity of human ethical tragedies—deliberately through the ethical knots incompletely untied, and the human factor incompletely revealed—so as to manifest the enduring ethical value of the literary text itself.

Key words: ethical knots, the human factor, Heart of Darkness

Sui Gang. On the Conradian Ethical Knots as Partly Untied, and the Human Factor as Partly Revealed in Heart of Darkness[J]. Foreign Literature Studies, 2017, 39(1): 50-59.

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