Heart Of Darkness Comparative Essay

Thesis: My thesis will revolve around two critics; Chinua Achebe and Caryl Phillips and their critical reception of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The focus will be on the two postcolonial writers regarding their history; a history of suffering because of their skin color and their experience of being confronted to a new society and the impact of it. In fact, the Nigerian writer experienced colonialism under the British rule and its consequences. The Kittitian writer, on the other hand, belongs to the second generation of immigrants in Britain and experienced the feeling of being an outsider and understood the fragility of identity. This may explain why the two men have different opinions and differ in their interpretation of Conrad’s novella. Indeed, they respond to it differently. To put it differently, while Achebe condemns and maintains that Conrad’s novella projects the image of Africa as the back of the world, Phillips defends it and argues the contrary. The thesis will discuss and will demonstrate how the both authors are highly influenced by their time period, their point of view and their conclusion about Heart of Darkness and finally how they managed to defend their position.

Plan:

1. Introduction

2. Two

In that year, he delivered a university lecture called “A Image of Africa; Racism in Heart of Darkness”. The Nigerian writer is outrage because of the description of the African people in the novella as barbaric and savages. This lecture is a direct response to Conrad’s work and its author did not hesitate to say explicitly that the novella inherits extreme racial slurs and condemns it. His target was nothing else but Heart of Darkness and in order to make the readers realize that it indeed contains racism, he supports his claims with examples quoted directly from the short novel to point out to the harsh description of Africa as the opposite of Europe and as the back of the