Comparing Camus The Stranger And Conrad's Heart Of Darkness

In the twentieth century, precisely at the end of 1970s and beginning of 1980s a new school of criticism has appeared to uncover the veil of colonialism. This school is known as the post-colonial theory. The most known critique who publically introduces this critique is Edward Said. Post-colonial theory concentrates on the hegemony of the West over the East or the domination of the Occident over the Orient. To prove their power and to dominate the east; the west needed to implant their superiority and civilization against the "other".

This paper concentrates on the concepts of "self and other" using the post-colonial interpretations of two novels; one is Camus 's The Stranger and the other one is Conrad 's Heart of Darkness, and it aims to prove that both novels are full of racism and speak about the West as "self", and represent the

Edward Said believes that:" Similarly Conrad and Camus are not merely representative of so relatively weightless…but rather of Western dominance in the non-European world" (culture and imperialism.173).

The (self/other) representation in the Western literature is very obvious; it is revealed by well-known Western authors who represent this idea in a very smooth and smart way, in which it could be absorbed by the reader without noticing that it touches him, and he would admire those authors for such a great piece of art. The concept of 'self ' and 'other ' is a very broad term that reflexes every human 's life; there is no 'self ' without 'other ', when one person talks about himself with the pronoun 'I ' there must be an 'other ' which is not him. But this concept in literature has been developed to describe a certain group of people who control and dominate another group. In other words the 'self and other ' could be defined as the colonial project of the West to dominate and to