/lit/ - Literature

post favorite books about descent into insanity/madness

So I just finished of this and I gotta say, I don't get it. I mean it was a nice read and all but I don't understand what everyone says about it.

I was under the impression that it was to be a journey into the horrors, savagery and darkness in the heart of man. That Kurtz was to be a character of profound meaning.

Instead I got what seemed to be a lazy trip up a river where nothing much happened, certainly nothing horrific or savage so as to make you question the nature of man as I was lead to believe I would feel after reading. Most disappointingly of all, Kurtz was barely even a character at all. Having less than a paragraph of dialogue in total and pretty much no mention of things he'd done or experienced, it didn't inspire in me at all the characters of the novel seem to feel, that I was supposed to feel.

Am I just too shallow to get it? Is the novel laden with subtext that I skimmed over somehow? Someone explain this book to me because I just didn't get it.

ITT: Favorite book.

Should I read Heart of Darkness before watching Apocalypse Now? Or vice-versa? Why?

What the fuck is it with all these stupid libtards thinking this book was racist and was meant to show how barbaric Africans are, when it obviously wasn't?

Why are people today so fucking retarded? Why do they try and shoehorn their stupid beliefs in every fucking piece of literature?

Can we all agree that political correctness is the cancer killing modern society?

Any books similiar to pic related?

I always hear people complain about how studying a certain piece of literature in a classroom ruined it for them. Can we have a thread where people talk about the opposite?

Are there any pieces of literature that you only liked because of what you learned when you studied it?

Pic related. Didn't really like it when I read it on my own, but after studying the historical context, the critical history, and discussing things like the role of women, the symbolism present, and the binary oppositions in the novella, I found it to be a really fascinating work.

Hey lit, I am currently studying Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and yet I am struggling with certain concepts and ideas in the book. Would anyone you literary fellow care to share your ideas and/or readings seen in the novel?

What is the role of the Russian harlequin in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness?

I had to read the first few pages of Heart of Darkness for tomorrow, but I forgot the book at school. Where can I find a free digital copy for these and other books? I know this can be solved with a simple google search, but I wanted to know if you guys know of any particular website that you like to use to get digital copies of books/scans/etc that you would recomend, since I will probably find a lot of use out of it.

Captcha: equaly cuckold. eww.