Heart Of DarknessEssay Preview: Heart Of DarknessReport this essayThe immortality and blindness to a dark continentJoseph Conrad’s s novel “Heart of Darkness” portrays an image of Africa that is dark and inhuman. Not only does he describe the actual, physical continent of Africa as “so hopeless and so dark, so impenetrable to human thought, so pitiless to human weakness”, (Conrad 2180) as though the continent could neither breed nor support any true human life. Conrad lived through a time when European colonies were scattered all over the world. This phenomenon and the doctrine of colonialism bought into at his time obviously influenced his views at the time of “Heart of Darkness” publication. Very few people saw anything amiss with colonialism in Africa and the African people. From a Eurocentric point of view, colonialism was the natural next-step in any powerful countries political agenda. The colonizers did not pay heed to the native peoples in their territories, nor did they think of the natives as anything but savages. In the “Heart of Darkness”, Joseph Conrad uses Marlow to contradict the acts of man and the destruction they brought forth to Africa and their people. Conrad shows, through fiction, that the blindness and lack of morality in Africa allowed for the release of the darkness from the hearts of the colonists.
In the opening of his novel, “Heart of Darkness”, Conrad, through Marlow, establishes his thoughts on colonialism. He says that conquerors only use brute force, “nothing to boast of” (Conrad 2143) because it arises, by accident, from anothers weakness. Marlow compares his subsequent tale of colonialism with that of the Roman colonization of Northern Europe and the fascination associated with such an endeavor. In comparison to Marlow thoughts on European colonizing, Sir Henry Morton Stanley, the writer of “Manchester Chamber of Commerce”, states that “No part of Africa, look where I might, appeared so promising to me as this neglected tenth part of the continent” (Stanley 2201) which seem to me that he was fascinated in colonizing and retrieving money for his findings, with no moral thought with the people who colonized there. Stanley goes on and states, “but unfortunately the European nations will not heed this cry” (Stanley 2201), which clearly shows a careless act of taken over a country that doesn’t want to be touch. Marlow challenges this viewpoint by painting a heinous picture of the horrors of colonialist ventures as we explore deeper into the recesses of the novel. Here we find that Marlow sees colonization as “robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind – as it is very proper for those who tackle darkness” (Conrad 2143). Further, he sees such conquests as taking land and materials away from those people who “have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses” (Conrad 2143). As he understands it, colonization is only successful if there lays within it a “devotion to efficiency” (Conrad 2143) and a creation of civilization.
Throughout “Heart of Darkness”, Conrad uses images of darkness to represent the blindness of seaman traveling for ivory in Africa. Darkness is demonstrated as anything unknown to man, primitive, evil, and mysterious. To Conrad, Africa is the very representation of darkness. Marlow often uses the phrase, “We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness” (Conrad 2165), to describe his progress on the Congo with a feeling of the unknown coming towards Marlow and his men. By traveling farther and farther down the Congo, Marlow and his crew get closer and closer to the epicenter of this foreboding darkness, and the hell of immorality. The unknown continent of Africa look and feel was dark and unknown to the naked eye, “Beyond the fence the forest stood up spectrally in the moonlight, and through the dim stir, through the faint sounds of that lamentable courtyard, the silence of the land went home to one’s very heart its mystery, its greatness, the amazing reality of its concealed life” (Conrad 2158). The portrayal of Africa is explained as both a romantic frontier and a foreboding wilderness; which portrays Marlow’s love and sadness of a land that has been rape and disrespected repeatedly by man. In contrast to my statement, Chinua Achebe, a modern writer of “An Image of Africa”, sees Conrad’s description of the character Marlow, as a point of racism towards the people in Africa and not a positive message of that time. Achebe said, “A novel which celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art. My answer is: No” (Achebe 2207). Achebe, in my opinion failed to see the point Conrad was trying to make in his novel, which is that Conrad is not telling the story of the jungle, or of Africa, or even of nature in general, but rather is writing about the human being and his capacity for evil. Conrad is only trying to reveal to the world about how natives were mistreated, and opening the eyes of the world.
Conrad depicts Africa as a land where the prehistoric has been preserved. The people are still primitive and blind to the unknown acts of people outside their continent. He describes the journey up the Congo as something similar to a trip on a time machine:
“Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliestbeginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the bigtrees were kings . . . There were moments when one’s past came back toone, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare toyourself; but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream,remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of thisstrange world of plants, and water, and silence. And this stillness of lifedid not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacableforce brooding over an inscrutable intention” (Conrad 2164).In Conrad’s eyes, Africa is a land where the past is sustained, in which by the end of the story Marlow tells the story of Kurtz over and over to his sailors on The Nellie in hopes
“(R) where the current of time might not continue in spite of his attempts.In the following, I will attempt to explain the meaning of the words “what is”‚´⬾¯ (the idea of, in Latin meaning “to believe in a lie”, in our English, is in many ways a synonym for “to believe”).My original intention was to do the story “on the sea where the past has led”, a metaphor which is based on the idea of “what is”, though not as opposed to what the previous stories refer to, and to see what it takes and what is there that is interesting and interesting. The problem was that this was based on what I was doing in a novel, as it didn’t come from the time I was finishing a novel I was writing, but, while I was editing that, I realised that I wanted to be a part of it, with people telling the stories of our future, and having our “past” and our future in our minds, and, as such, we had to put those ideas in the writing or we would lose interest. So, in a sense, the story I was writing was about our future, we were all “what?”, only they were never very important that I felt, so there was nothing for me to do in that world even if, for example, the people in our foreheads said that I was “what? My imagination was the same!”. But because the people in our face (and the writers had not asked me to be in their forehead if I was going to have to tell the past-which is what I believed, but then again, I was in my head after all, right?) were as important as the people in our foreheads was for me, and they were more important than the authors as well (but you know who I am to say that about myself!) and, of course, if I were to turn all those people into monsters, I was going to get annoyed and become really uninterested in them for the rest of the novel; that might take away some of my enjoyment.It’s not that we don’t like to make fun of those that we know well, but the writing was a complete mess. The people that were in the book were all too attached to one particular character and was not quite sympathetic to the characters as we thought we had them. The real story was a really complicated book with all the problems, including many of the ideas that were brought to my head from different angles. I guess I can tell you one thing I liked, I liked the stories, especially the ‘bad’ stories in The Nellie. Those were about the bad people.The plot of The Nellie was fairly simple, and yet it turned out badly in that regard: as in the first two years of Conrad