Richard answers “is this book is easy to understand?”

Abdullah asked this question about Heart of Darkness:

is this book is easy to understand?

Richard In one sense, it's pretty easy — neither the vocabulary nor sentence structure is especially difficult. Compared to many other "great books", this one…moreIn one sense, it's pretty easy — neither the vocabulary nor sentence structure is especially difficult. Compared to many other "great books", this one is short and pretty simple.

That said, there are some confusing elements, such as the fact that some characters are known by titles instead of names, or that the narrative skips around a bit.

What makes this difficult is that it obviously has many layers of meaning that the reader can spend hours thinking about. A lot of people are first exposed to it as a school assignment, and resent that so much that they don't realize it's a pretty easy one. If those students compared it to The Brothers Karamozov or Moby-Dick, they'd see they're introduced to complex literature in a very gentle manner.(less)

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Heart of Darkness

by Joseph Conrad

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