Heart of Darkness is a classic novella by Joseph Conrad about a fatal boat trip into the Belgian Congo that inspired the film Apocalypse Now. Three Men In A Boat (To Say Nothing Of The Dog) is a light comic novel about the misadventures of three Londoners who take a boating holiday on the Thames with an ill-behaved dog. How well can you spot the differences between the two? Take our quiz to find out:
Heart of Darkness or Three Men In A Boat?
1. “I can’t sit still and see another man slaving and working. I want to get up and superintend, and walk round with my hands in my pockets, and tell him what to do. It is my energetic nature. I can’t help it.”
2. “I don’t like work–no man does–but I like what is in the work–the chance to find yourself. Your own reality–for yourself not for others–what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.”
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3. “Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you, smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, “Come and find out”.”
4. “On one point we were all agreed, and that was that, come what might, we would go through with this job to the bitter end. We had come out for a fortnight’s enjoyment on the river, and a fortnight’s enjoyment on the river we meant to have. If it killed us! well, that would be a sad thing for our friends and relations, but it could not be helped.”
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5. “The river – with the sunlight flashing from its dancing wavelets, gilding gold the grey-green beech- trunks, glinting through the dark, cool wood paths, chasing shadows o’er the shallows, flinging diamonds from the mill-wheels, throwing kisses to the lilies, wantoning with the weirs’ white waters, silvering moss-grown walls and bridges, brightening every tiny townlet, making sweet each lane and meadow, lying tangled in the rushes, peeping, laughing, from each inlet, gleaming gay on many a far sail, making soft the air with glory – is a golden fairy stream.
But the river – chill and weary, with the ceaseless rain-drops falling on its brown and sluggish waters, with a sound as of a woman, weeping low in some dark chamber; while the woods, all dark and silent, shrouded in their mists of vapour, stand like ghosts upon the margin; silent ghosts with eyes reproachful, like the ghosts of evil actions, like the ghosts of friends neglected – is a spirit-haunted water through the land of vain regrets.”
6. “The brown current ran swiftly, bearing us down towards the sea with twice the speed of our upward progress; and life was running swiftly, too, ebbing, ebbing out of his heart into the sea of inexorable time. I saw the time approaching when I would be left alone of the party of ‘unsound method.’”
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7. “If he were a man of strong mind, it only gave him fits; but a person of mere average intellect it usually sent mad.”
8. “But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself and, by heavens I tell you, it had gone mad.”
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9. ”And this also,” he said suddenly, “has been one of the dark places of the earth.”
10. “Thirst is a dangerous thing.”
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11. “Sunlight is the life-blood of Nature. Mother Earth looks at us with such dull, soulless eyes, when the sunlight has died away from out of her. It makes us sad to be with her then; she does not seem to know us or to care for us.”
12. “Between us there was, as I have already said somewhere, the bond of the sea. Besides holding our hearts together through long periods of separation, it had the effect of making us tolerant of each other’s yarns—and even convictions.”
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13. “I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.”
14. ”‘Yes, I know,’ I said with something like despair in my heart, but bowing my head before the faith that was in her.”
ANSWER KEY
1. Three Men In A Boat
2. Heart of Darkness
3. Heart of Darkness
4. Three Men In A Boat
5. Three Men In A Boat
6. Heart of Darkness
7. Three Men In A Boat
8. Heart of Darkness
9. Heart of Darkness
10. Three Men In A Boat
11. Three Men In A Boat
12. Heart of Darkness
13. Three Men In A Boat
14. Heart of Darkness
Tags: books, heart of darkness, jerome k. jerome, joseph conrad, literary comparisons, quiz, thematic analysis, three men in a boat
10/14 but I guessed on a few. WOULD BE HORRIFIED AGAIN
12 of 14! I’ve never read Heart of Darkness, but I did just reread Three Men in a Boat for like the eighth time, so that helped.
Me, too! But I’ve never read Three Men in a Boat, loving instead Heart of Darkness (reading it on a gloomy, rainy day makes one’s life a little more bearable).
Dude you should read Three Men in a Boat, it proves that people in the past were feckless and hypochondriacs and loved their awful pets too much.
Also there’s a passage where he talks shit about Elizabethan pottery, and asks if someday the teacups that maids smash out of sheer high spirits will someday become super important and suchlike. And they did!
Totally. Three men in a Boat was published 125 years ago and it’s still funny. His description of the way that tow-lines get tangled could be rewritten about earbud cords today and still be thought amusing.
Ditto in every respect except that it’s been a while since my last read of Three Men. The pair that tripped me up was #11/12, but afterwards I could see how I had gone wrong and how I should have known better.
I studied Heart of Darkness in high school, but I never actually read it.
14 out of 14! I have read Heart of Darkness once, in preparation for university, and remember almost nothing of it, but have read Three Men and a Boat over and over. I am very clear in my mind as to which is the better book.
I read Heart of Darkness. Once. For AP English. Got an F on the paper.
I vote for Three Men in a Boat, with honourable mention to Connie Willis’ To Say Nothing of the Dog.
Cheat sheet: Ask yourself, IS THIS RACIST? If so, answer Heart of Darkness.
I’ve only read the first half of Three Men in a Boat because I actually got scared that the second half couldn’t possibly be as wonderful as the first and I don’t think I could bear the disappointment.
I did this for Catch-22!
14/14 Accomplishment of the day! 😉
I will soon take an exam on Joseph Conrad and I will just pretend taking this quiz counts as studying…
12/14, pretty good I think. I love Jerome K Jerome’s long-winded day-dreams and musings almost as much as I love his comic scenes. Because I am one of those people who likes casting fake movie versions of books, I’m going to try to cast Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog (who will really be the hardest to cast, right?)). Actually it might be harder to cast the other two men, because I can’t keep them straight.
Is David Tennant too easy a pick for a sometimes-pretentious, malleable-faced British man?
12/14, numbers 11 and 12 tripped me up. How do you come up with these things? This is brilliant.
Full marks! And I don’t even like either book much! I was in the ‘Heart of Darkness is super-racist’ camp when we covered it in a seminar. Yesss!
I was going along great on questions 1-10 but then hubris & ignorance got the better of me and I screwed the last 4 up.
Full marks! 😀 Never read Heart of Darkness, but I may or may not have read Three Men in a Boat multiple times since I was 11. Has anyone else read the sequel, Three Men on the Bummel?
10/14 – I got 9 through 12 wrong. Woe! I read Heart of Darkness once for university, and haven’t reread Three Men In A Boat for a few years now. It’s obviously time! Also maybe time to rewatch the Soviet film version of the latter.
100% because I recognized my high school vocabulary words in the Heart of Darkness quotes…
A must read. Three men in a boat.
Nothing whatsoever to do about boats or Boat Loans but still an eyeopener.