The Existential Theme of Alienation, Term Paper Example

The Existential Theme of Alienation in Three Books: Heart of Darkness, As I Lay Dying and Season of Migration to the North

In a 1946 lecture Jean-Paul Sartre said: “There is no other universe except the human universe, the universe of human subjectivity. . . .what man needs is to find himself again and to understand that nothing can save him from himself.” In the three books we have read (Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner and Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih), the characters are all struggling with a profound sense of alienation. In each case there is one character that risks a voyage to the unknown — and loses his soul, if not his mind. They view the world subjectively: what each makes of what is happening in the outside world is how he defines himself (or fails to do so). Both Conrad and Salih are also concerned with the evils of colonialism, while Faulkner is focused on the issue of what it means to be alive. Yet all three of them similarly portray people who are disconnected — to the point of madness — from the world around them. KK:Good, clear thesis statement.

The characters of Kurtz (Heart of Darkness) and Mustafa Sa’eed Othman (Season of Migration to the North) certainly have made extreme journeys, which cost them their sanity and ultimately, their lives. Kurtz travels up the Congo to the darkest depths of Africa, where he begins to think of himself as a god and where, for him, there are no limits on what he can do. Without these limits, and with the adulation of the credulous natives, he loses his way and with it, his soul.

Mustafa, on the other hand, loses his way in the wilds of London in the aftermath of the Great War, during the Roaring Twenties. He loves to learn but apparently has no sense of humor and derives no joy from learning (26). To attract women, he defines himself by Oriental clichés: “I . . . fabricated stories about deserts of golden sands and jungles where non-existent animals called out to each other,” and “I’m like Othello — Arab-African,” he tells Isabella Seymour (32-3). The women “yearned for tropical climes, cruel suns, purple horizons. . . . I am South that yearns for the North and the ice” (27). With each woman he uses a different name, and each of the women — except Jean Morris, whom he murders — commits suicide when he ultimately tires of them. To defend him in his murder trial, his lawyer resorts to begging his client to say, “This Mustafa Sa’eed does not exist. He is an illusion, a lie” (28). At last he returns, not to his native Khartoum, but to the tiny village of Wad Hamid (on the Nile, in Sudan), the unnamed narrator’s hometown. Mustafa belongs nowhere because he has been everywhere. Ultimately, he disappears (apparently into the Nile, which — coincidentally? — flows to the north), and is assumed to be dead — or did he kill himself?

Later, the narrator finds out that Mustafa was a British citizen, a strong proponent of British imperialism and possibly a secret agent in the Middle East, who lived “like a lord in the English countryside” (46), the opposite of the simple farmer he was trying to become in Wad Hamid. The narrator also discovers that Mustafa has left his “wife, two sons, and all [his] worldly goods” (54) to his care. Like Charles Marlow (in Heart of Darkness), he is responsible for the legacy of this dead madman. Marlow chooses to whitewash Kurtz’s madness and excesses when he returns to the unnamed city and the abandoned fiancée, thinking it kinder to tell her that Kurtz died with her name on his lips (129).

The truth, of course, is that Kurtz’ last words were: “The horror! The horror!” (116).  KK:Good use of quotations and making the connections between texts, but you may wish to expand and develop your analysis to fully explore these connections. Marlow describes this outcry as a victory: it is “an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions. But it was a victory!” (119). The victory is that Kurtz had judged the whole universe in this final statement, which at least expressed a belief, a conviction that “had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth — the strange commingling of desire and hate” (118). Pushing himself to the brink of madness and beyond, Kurtz had defined both himself and humankind in a purely subjective, existential fashion.

The narrator who inherits Mustafa’s legacy is more passive than Charles Marlow, and his sins are those of inaction, as when he refuses to marry Mustafa’s widow, even when he loves her, to protect her from an unwanted marriage, that would have fatal consequences. The inherited legacy includes a locked room in Mustafa’s old house — reminiscent of Dorian Gray — which is filled with every possible memento of Mr. Sa’eed’s checkered life in Britain: photographs, poems, scraps of paper recording trysts (or are they fiction?): “There was no limit to his egoism and his conceit; despite everything he wanted history to immortalize him” (154). The narrator resolves to burn everything, thus destroying Mustafa’s image of himself, which may be — in the existential sense — tantamount to killing him again. KK:A litte confusing as to how the characters share or don’t share the theme of alienation. Expand your analysis to better make the connections clearer.

The journey across the Mississippi countryside undertaken by the family in As I Lay Dying is no less fraught with peril than those in the other two books, even though it is only to a town that seems far away simply because they are driving a mule team in bad weather. The clearest voice is that of the son Darl — who ends up purportedly going mad at the end of the story. He seems to be omniscient, knowing the exact circumstances of his mother’s death — including what was said by each of the witnesses — even though he and his brother, Jewel, are miles away at that moment. Throughout their lives the family members say little of importance to each other, keeping their rich interior monologues locked away in secrecy, rather like Mustafa’s secret room. Perhaps because Darl can see into their hearts, they feel they have to sacrifice him to an asylum, although the reason given is that he had burned down a barn and they didn’t want him to be prosecuted.

Thus it can be concluded that each of them is completely alienated from all of the others, as well as from the world around them. At one point Darl muses:

In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I don’t know what I am. I dont know if I am or not (27).

Similarly in all three books, the “crazy” characters are unsure of who they are and fictionalize their lives until they have difficulty separating their imaginary world from reality — if such a thing exists. Once again, we are returned to Sartre’s “universe of human subjectivity” (1946). Marlowe says of Kurtz, “his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself, and . . . I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself” (110). KK:Good point of comparison. Again, may wish to expand analysis. Also, how do the rivers connect as metaphors of alienation?

Another puzzled — and puzzling — character in Faulkner’s book is Addie Bundren, the wife and mother who is dying at the beginning of the story. She is, perhaps, the most alienated character I have ever come across in any book, saying: “the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time” (57). She seems to hate everyone (except maybe Jewel, her bastard child by a local minister), and has been apparently waiting for death virtually since she was born. While she is dying in her bed by a window, she can see her oldest son lovingly crafting a coffin for her outside. While some members of the family think this is very insensitive of him, she does not seem disturbed by it.

Addie’s death opens up endless questions of what death means for both Darl and his little brother, Vardaman, who has caught a fish and confuses the death of the fish with that of his mother. His secret ruminations open up some of the same questions as Mustafa’s secret room: who is the real person? What are they after they are dead? This sort of questioning begs the classic Zen question (or koan): “Show me your original face . . . before your parents were born” (Strand). Sartre would have it that man exists first and then defines himself. That is, at the beginning he is nothing, and then he becomes what he makes of himself. This places the responsibility for self-definition directly on the shoulders of each and every one of us, and even inaction and passivity (which is obliquely what Addie has chosen) is a moral choice.

In Faulkner’s story, the oldest son, Cash, chooses to saw boards and build things to mark his time on earth, and seems to be relatively happy defining himself in this manner. He takes pride in his craftsmanship and that becomes who is. The narrator in Salih’s tale, however, chooses passivity, and the outcome is the bloody deaths of Hosna, his love, and her violent second husband, who murder each other. At the end, the narrator wants to choose suicide for himself. However, as he floats away up the Nile, he suddenly craves a cigarette, and feels an overpowering need for his village, his friends and to carry out his duties to Mustafa’s sons — plus the simple life his grandfather has chosen — that persuades him to choose life instead. Finally, he strikes out for the shore, calling for help. Unlike Mustafa, the narrator is rooted in his village by the accident of his birth, and these roots oddly give him the courage to live, while Mustafa’s cosmopolitan rootlessness led to his suicide, as the narrator supposes his death is. KK:What about a connection to Heart of Darkness?

Meanwhile, the entire family in As I Lay Dying is so alienated from each other that only Jewel, the brother who almost never speaks, seems to be truly upset that his mother is dead. Yet he refuses to say goodbye to her when he and Darl have to leave just before her death, even when Darl presciently tells him Addie will not be alive when they return. Because he seems to not care about his mother, but only about the horse he has nearly killed himself working to buy, Darl says Jewel’s mother is his horse. This conclusion, of course, confuses young Vardaman even more, as he now has a fish and a horse associated with his deceased mother, and he is obsessed with trying to solve the mysteries of life and death. The daughter, Dewey Dell — the only surviving female in this large, dysfunctional group — throws herself onto her mother’s body at the moment of her death, but she is not really there in spirit. All she can think about throughout this book is that she is pregnant and that she must find a way to get an abortion. Worst of all is the father, Anse, who blames everyone and everything for his shortcomings and mishaps. Even as they are finally burying his wife, he focuses only on getting a set of teeth and marrying another woman right then and there.

Loss also seems to be a recurring motif in this story, as well as non-communication and alienation. As the family tries to cross a flooded stream with the wagon and mule team, a log hits the wagon and everything is lost except human life (and Cash is almost a casualty, at that). Cash had been warning them all along that the load was unbalanced, and this is a good way to describe the family, as well. The mules drown, but they recover the coffin. At that point, Anse has to sell his precious farm equipment that ensures their very survival, and even Jewel agrees to sell his dearest possession, his horse, so they can fulfill this meaningless quest to have their mother buried with her family. Cash is in danger of losing his leg, Dewey cannot find a way to get an abortion and they all agree that Darl has lost his sanity, when, in order to put an end to the futility of the journey, he tries to burn up the coffin which is in the barn of a farmer who has given them shelter. Jewel saves the livestock, but Darl has now lost his chance to live his life outside of an asylum. If this book is a metaphor for life, then life is either insane, or only means whatever we (randomly?) choose to ascribe to it. As Cash says at the end, “It’s like there was a fellow in every man . . . that watches the sane and the insane doings of that man with the same horror and the same astonishment” (82).

The conclusion that Marlow comes to in Heart of Darkness — namely, that Kurtz has conquered life KK:Has he truly conquered it?  by taking it to the extreme — comes at the end of another journey that has no clear meaning. Mustafa’s global meanderings and his debauchery in London (Season of Migration to the North) give his life nothing he can hang onto, either. These characters end up completely alienated from the world as well as from themselves. The narrator finally burns all traces of the man and his crazy life that may have ultimately killed him. Then, after jumping into the Nile, he swims for the shore, as it is the only alternative to the fatal “migration to the north” (which is where the Nile would have finally taken him, as it took Mustafa). KK:Again, how do the rivers act as metaphors among the texts?

Conrad, Faulkner and Salih are celebrated authors, and certainly deserve the acclaim they have earned. These three books, Heart of Darkness, As I Lay Dying and Season of Migration to the North, pose questions that are not easy to answer, and present life from the point of view of people who are trying to find its meaning for themselves, with varying degrees of success. Salih if very much concerned with the problems posed by colonialism, as he is writing only ten years after Sudan gained independence. Even as Mustafa was corrupted by London (“the north”), Mustafa corrupted — and arguably killed (obliquely or otherwise) — four British women. To the author, the sword of colonialism cuts both ways. Likewise, Kurtz does serious damage to the people around him in “darkest Africa,” even hanging a collection of the shrunken heads of his victims from his fence. Yet he is the one who dies in agony (both physically and mentally), screaming, “The horror! The horror!”

Faulkner, by writing about uneducated “poor white” farmers in Mississippi is breaking new ground in American literature by paying attention to this class of people. He shows what poverty does to them, but does not allude to the civil war or the dominant northern U.S. that may — or may not — be responsible for their poverty. Their insanity (or sanity) is that of Everyman. They are grappling with the intellectual questions that well-educated philosophers would struggle with after the next War (Faulkner wrote the book in 1929, after the Great War and its craziness had significantly remade the world into which he had been born). People such as the Bundrens, had they been alive in 1946, would never have heard of Jean-Paul Sartre. However, their dislocation from each other and the world around them — and their need to make sense of it all — would have been familiar to him.

The same is true for all of us, as well as “the narrator,” Mustafa, Marlow, Kurtz and even Kurtz’ fiancée, who would not have wanted to change her perception of Kurtz’ life, even if she had begged Marlow to tell her the truth.

It has been said that we all live by selected fictions. The hardest work of all, it seems, is to try to really grasp what is going on outside of us (in spite of our inevitable alienated, subjective condition) — and come to terms with it in a way that will drive our lives forward, endow our actions with some moral sense and direction, and give our lives a meaning we can appreciate. This process will force us to confront our alienation from “objective reality” as well as to confront our inner selves and our own mortality. We must then try to reconnect (with the world and ourselves), even though this may never be truly possible.

Works Cited

Conrad, Joseph. “Heart of Darkness.” Claremont: Coyote Canyon Press, 2007. Print. 16 April 2014.

Faulkner, William. “As I Lay Dying.” First Vintage International Edition, October 1990. Print. 16 April 2014.

Salih, Tayeb. “Season of Migration to the North.” Johannesburg: Heinemann Publishers (Pty) Limited, 1969. Print. 16 April 2014.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Existentialism Is a Humanism.” https://www.marxists.org/reference
/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm, 1946. Web. 16 April 2014.

Strand, Clark. “Green Koans: Case 12.” http://www.tricycle.com/web-exclusive/green-koans-case-12-original-face, 2010. Web. 16 April 2014.