Spiritual journey into the heart of darkness Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness can be a story about colonisation, revealing its inconveniences and corruption, but it can also be understood as a journey in the depths of one's psyche, if taken on a symbolic level. At the beginning of the novel the reader is informed that Marlow is “not typical,” that he, unlike the homely sailors, is a “wanderer.” He has no home, in the psychological sense of the term. It simply “follows the sea”. This may evoke the interpretation that the man is disturbed, that he seeks to discover the secrets of his soul, to know himself. Even as a boy he was interested in unexplored lands and especially in a long, winding, serpent-like river, with its "head" in the sea and its "tail" plunging deep into the land, which, as Marlow admits, "enchanted" him. . This image resembles the map of a journey from the dark lands of the soul, the free and uncivilized core, which can be called the Freudian Id, towards the light, that is, the Superego. Marlow wishes to follow this path in the opposite direction...