Question

Excerpt adapted from

Heart of Darkness
by Joseph Conrad

Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, a dense forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances. On silvery sand-banks hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side. The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands; you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted all day long against sand banks, trying to find the channel, till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off for ever from everything you had known once—somewhere—far away—in another existence perhaps.


Select the correct answer.

Read the excerpt from Heart of Darkness.

What is the most likely purpose of this part of the story?

A.
to describe the character’s conflict with the setting
B.
to create a subplot that introduces a minor detail
C.
to conclude the events that resulted in a turning point
D.
to introduce a new decision that will need to be made

Answer 1

A. to describe the character’s conflict with the setting

Step-by-step explanation:

In this excerpt from Heart of Darkness, the narrator puts the accent on the surroundings, and how unpleasant it is. It gives the feeling of being lost in the prehuman era when nature and wilderness dominated, but in a negative sense. The feeling was even more intensive since the narrator traveled alone, and being alone in a, from a traveler`s point of view, hostile environment with wild animals like alligators, warm air that seems like it is unbreathable and awareness like you are in some enchanted trap where there is no way out, made the narrator feel a little bit anxious, though a man in greatness and infinity of nature is just a grain of sand, and that is even scarier.