Sarah Kells Class Notes Feb 7-Feb 17

We spent the majority of this time studying Heart of Darkness and watching Apocalypse Now.

This novella combines symbols of the Garden of Eden and some of Dante's ideas, which asks how both of these can exist at the same time in the same place.  We did not come up with an answer for this.

Metacognition: "knowing without knowing."  This is something that could be seen as a kind of survival tool.

We discussed the roles of women in this book - the three main types are the Crone, Mother and Maiden.
The Crones are the three women in the office.  Notice the 'magic number 3,' often related to witches.  This actually reminded me of Macbeth because for some reason, whenever I think of the number 3 relating to witches, I remember the scene with the witches around the cauldron.
The Mother figure is the aunt.
The Maiden is Kurz's fiance.
These are only three of the women.  Possibly the most important woman is the African woman that Kurz possibly is having an affair with.  She represents the land, in a way, therefore showing that Kurz's relation with the land has caused him to forget about his life (his fiance) where he came from.

Kurz's last words, "Oh, the horror" could mean many different things.  I took them to mean that now that he is dying, he realizes the futility of his life.  He realized that no matter how much ivory he took, or how much work he did, or how much fear he instilled into people, none of it really matters.  If somebody is a good person or a bad person, black or white, male or female, everybody ends with death.

Frame narrative: The narrator tells the story via another character.

At the end of this last week, we were watching Apocalypse Now, which is relatively disturbing.