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Heart Of Darkness Analysis

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Heart of Darkness is a novella about colonialism, about darkness and light, and about the changes that happen inside one person while being away from its regular society. The colonizers were supposed to treat the Africans as slaves, to live among them, to make from the enormous, dark forest their home. It altered ones way of being by treating the other with such contempt and even the darkness of forest strikes against the colonizer’s good intentions and personality traits by turning the white men into savages. This novella unlike the others from its time stresses about the alterated ego instead of the changes happened in the colonized territory. As the novella is based on contrasts, the two characters are also presented on the one hand having …show more content…

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 kind 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 living, 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 considers himself to be superior to them ‘They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now—nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom’ (Heart of Darkness, p 26). On the other hand, Kurtz had no feeling for those people. He was interested only in ivory and he considers ivory more important then everything else, as he threatens a man’s life so that he would give him the ivory that he collected for himself. Marlow sow heads of the black people on sticks. Those people ended up so because of Kurtz. It is a brutal impregnation of his barbaric actions and maintenance of the god-like status among the

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