INTRODUCTION
THE PHYSICAL/LITERAL ASPECTS OF HEART OF DARKNESS (Amanda Bayi)
The book offers a harsh picture of colonial enterprise. Darkness in this novel is regarded also as madness as Kurtz is mentally unstable because he is not close to his zone of reason and moral compass.
Marlow encounters scenes of torture, near-slavery and cruelty as he was traveling from the Outer Station to the Central Station and up the river to the Inner Station. He sees his helmsman as a piece of machine, since the Africans in this book are considered as objects. Marlow gains a lot of information by over hearing other people’s conversations and also by watching the world around him and seeing what is happening. An example is when he was having a conversation with the brick maker, and by him doing that he
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The Europeans ignorant ideals of what Africa is and how the people of Africa are. Their ignorant thinking of Africans supposed barbarism and savagery, their superiority complex that lead them into thinking that they would be better suited to rule over these unruly, undeserving and unequipped to handle the rich resources that Africa had to offer.
This ignorant mind set is ever so present in Kurtz. This point is made ever so clear in Chinua Achebe’s “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Hear of Darkness”. In it Achebe points out:
“Students of Heart of Darkness will often tell you that Conrad is concerned not so much of Africa as with the deterioration of one European mind caused by solitude and sickness … that the point of the story is to ridicule Europe’s civilising mission of Africa.”
In this statement Achebe’s is referring to Kurtz. Kurtz like all other Europeans believed that he came to Africa to civilize the African people. However what Kurtz didn’t know was that he too would become just as uncivilised as he thought the African people were. Essentially ‘’Africa is merely a setting for the disintegration of Mr Kurtz (Achebe;
The book serves as a sharp contrast with the deception of Colonists as well as a symbol of solid realness within a fantastical dream where truth is impossible. When describing the book, Marlow’s diction are highly positive, using words like “honest”, “humble” and “simple”. The direct expression and singleness of intention serves as a contrast with the lies the Colonists tell to conceal the reality in Africa. Europeans justify their bloodthirsty conquest as something they did for a greater cause. In 1876, at the Geographical Conference on Central Africa, King Leopold justified “To open to civilization the only part of our globe which it has not yet penetrated, to pierce the darkness which hangs over entire peoples, is, I dare say, a crusade worthy of this century of progress” (Cleary).
Throughout the book, Achebe made the Europeans look brutal and bossy. He showed their brutality through writing about the attack on the mall. Likewise, they made their own government and army, and used them to control and judge the Igbos based on their own system of justice. “They had built a court where the District Commissioner judged cases in ignorance” This quote proves the racism of Achebe in the way he wrote about how their government judged in ignorance.
Chapter 2 begins with the Heritage of Colonialism. This is an important aspect for the remainder of the book. Without understanding where African politics started and how it related to the world, one would not be able to appreciate the growth the nation has had. The author of this chapter, Crawford Young begins to explain European
The African mainland has become very synonymous with these three words; war, yearning and enduring. Between the 1870s and 1900, Africa confronted European radical animosity, discretionary weights, military attacks, and consequent success and colonization. In the meantime, African social orders set up different types of resistance against the endeavor to colonize their nations and force remote command. By the mid twentieth century, be that as it may, quite a bit of Africa, with the exception of Ethiopia and Liberia, had been colonized by European powers.
The racial prejudice by such scholars and the negative portrayal found their way to the public and thus lead to even more negative views. In the 17th century, an argument emerged, characterizing Africa as a place of famine, war, disease and poverty. This argument was further used by anti-abolitionists to make slavery in foreign countries a positive escape. Colonialism in Africa went even further to promote the negative portrayal of Africa and the colonial powers convinced themselves that they were redeeming “the land of fantastical beats and cannibals, slaves and backward races.”
Have you ever read a novel about African cultures and traditions from African point of view? The novel Things Fall Apart, a tragedy by Chinua Achebe, centers on one tragic hero in Igbo village of Umuofia in Nigeria and the effects of European arrival on his life and Igbo clan. Throughout the novel, Achebe introduces Igbo customs to the reader by creating several occurrences and how they react on them to claim that the Igbo is civilized before the Europeans arrive. The significant difference between Igbo and Western cultures is the way wisdom is passed on: Igbo oral traditions transmit values and knowledge orally by allegorical tales, while Western literary traditions educate people through generations by written texts, just like the novel itself.
The majority of the novella is told from Marlow’s perspective. Initially, Marlow is introduced as a sailor going to work an unknown job for The Company. The odd doctor and strange ladies knitting magnify the mystery of his job. Then his journey
Hunt Hawkins presents the controversy that Joseph Conrad’s, Heart of Darkness, encounters, as its contents portray Africans as dehumanizing, savage, and uncivilized beings. In order to provide a sufficient amount of information with regards to the controversy, Hawkins introduces the analysis of distinct scholars to describe racism, imperialism, and human nature. As a result, an analysis of the characters are provided to the audience and allow an individual to understand why Conrad decided to write Heart of Darkness the way he did. Thus, during this process, Hawkins describes the manifestation of the darkness that eventually consumes Kurtz.
Marlow tells his shipmates on the boat (the Nelly) that the natives passed him “within six inches, without a glance, with that complete, deathlike indifference of unhappy savages” (16). Marlow’s story of his experience exhibits how the Europeans captured the natives and forced them to work; to strip their home land of its resources and natural beauty. When the Europeans colonize Africa, they do not want to help the African people, but exploit them and put them to work for their own desire of obtaining ivory, rubber, and other resources and goods. As the Europeans imperialize the area, they do not build culture or assist in development of the Congo region, but break down culture as they enslave the natives and take away their rights, along with stripping the area of resources and natural, earthly beauty, which is conveyed through the cruel physical treatment towards the natives. This treatment is also presented through the literary devices that Conrad decides to use to reveal the experiences of the natives to the
Conrad uses examples of order and chaos throughout his novel to aid in the delivery of the differentiation of the truth of human nature and the sham of civilization. In these examples, order represents civilization and chaos represents the wilderness of Africa. When Marlow finally left the central station to retrieve Mr. Kurtz, he and his crew stop at an abandoned cottage in the middle of the jungle where a European once lived and noticed an old book on the table. Marlow says, “Not a very enthralling book; but at the first glance you could see the singleness of intention, an honest concern for the right way of doing work, . . . The simple od sailor, with is talk of chains and purchases, made me forget about the jungle and the pilgrims in a delicious sensation of having come upon something unmistakably real” (78).
As such, it can be said that the novel seeks to represent the Blacks of Africa as lowlife beings, prehistoric barbarians and savage creatures that have no rights to say anything for themselves. However, Conrad also shows a flipside to the typical ideology of Whites being superior to Blacks by representing the Blacks as a strong and restrained group of people, confined only due to helplessness. In the novel, the natives of Africa are first introduced with the use of animal imagery. The sentence “A lot of people, mostly black and naked, moved about like ants,” describes the Africans that were building the railroad.
This greed grew strong and grew into the establishment of imperialism through the use of slavery. While the greed is still growing the English have know lost all of their moral value and have cast aside the meaning of life for the Natives of the Congo. This hunger of greed allowed the civilized to become the uncivilized “savages” they paint the Natives to be. Mr. Kurtz is the man that the english view as the idol in a way but dies seeing “The Horror”(154) of all the darkness the “light”(68) has made. Works Cited Qu, Caie.
From the narrator Marlow the readers come to know about the Natives that they are actually innocent people who were under Europeans. In relation to this it deals with the theme of Good vs. Evil, in ‘Heart of Darkness’ which is presented when Marlow who is a good character encounters the situation where he is confused between good and evil, whether Mr. Kurtz is really a
Marlow tells his shipmates on the boat (the Nelly) that the natives passed him “within six inches, without a glance, with that complete, deathlike indifference of unhappy savages” (16). Marlow’s story of his experience exhibits how the Europeans captured the natives and forced them to work; to strip their homeland of its resources and natural beauty. When the Europeans colonize Africa, they do not want to help the African people, but exploit them and put them to work for their own desire of obtaining ivory, rubber, and other resources and goods. As the Europeans imperialize the area, they do not build culture or assist in the development of the Congo region, but break down culture as they enslave the natives and take away their rights, along with stripping the area of resources and natural, earthly beauty, which is conveyed through the cruel physical treatment towards the natives. This treatment is also presented through the literary devices that Conrad decides to use to reveal the experiences of the natives to the
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad is a story that centers around Marlow, an introverted sailor, and his treacherous journey up the Congo River in search of a man name Kurtz. Unfamiliar with the terrain and natives, Marlow faced many different obstacles that made his journey even more tough. Obstacles like the Congo River and the dense jungles that surround it not only limited the crew progress, but also aroused confusion as well. Joseph Conrad amazing use of descriptive wording and imagery help the readers understand why their surrounding was giving them uneasiness throughout their expedition to meet up with Kurtz. The readers can understand why nature was truly an adversary to Marlow and his crew.