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Colonialism In Joseph Conrad's Heart Of Darkness

875 Words4 Pages

Heart of Darkness is a novella about colonialism, about darkness and light, and about the modifications that arise inside one person while being away from its traditional society. The colonizers were expected to treat the Africans as slaves, to live among them, to make from the massive, dark forest their home. It altered one’s way of being by treating the other with such contempt and even the darkness of forest strikes against the colonizer’s honorable intentions and personality traits by turning the white men into savages. This novella unlike the others of its time stresses about the altered ego instead of the changes happened in the colonized territory. As the novella is based on contrasts, the two characters are also desplayed on the one hand, having distinctions and on the other hand, being similar.
In the first place there is the manner that Marlow and Kurtz view the black people. Perhaps it is also a matter of the time spent in Congo. Marlow even gives to a black man a biscuit ‘’ I found nothing else to do but to offer him one of my good Swede’s ship’s biscuits I had in my pocket. ‘’ (Heart of Darkness, p 26). He acts kindhearted with the men on his boat, and when his helmsman dies, he throws him aboard so that the cannibals won’t eat him, as they were starving. Even though he sees all the injustices that the Africans are enduring, he doesn’t make any effort in stopping them. Although he doesn’t see them as a threat and feels a little bit of compassion for them, he

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