Heart of Darkness: Discuss its value and relevance to a modern audience. Do these works have anything to teach us about modern life?
Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness shows the ugly side of colonialism in the Congo. Africa is not shown as it 'really' is in Conrad's novel. Rather, Africa is seen through the exotic perspective of a European, Marlow, who believes that the protagonist Mr. Kurtz has been corrupted by African cultural influence. Conrad, through the use of irony and evocative description, demonstrates that Kurtz has perverted native African culture and made himself into a false god. Kurtz has been sleeping with local women as if it is his birthright and using fear to keep Africans under his sway. He is dying a physical and moral death, unable to sustain his European way of life in an environmentally hostile land.
While Heart of Darkness shows the European view of colonialism as detrimental to the moral fabric of Europeans, the fall-out from colonialism is felt by Africans far more deeply today. While Kurtz exits "the horror, the horror" through death, and his fiancee is protected from the truth of his true nature, Africans today must with the suffering of the economic and political destruction caused by colonialism. Africa suffers from both political instability and economic devastation that has been at least partially brought upon it by European imposition. Europe created nation-states based upon arbitrary combinations of tribes, and undid ancient methods of farming and tribal ways to create markets for European goods. Colonialism never created a sustainable economic system for the good of Africans. Culturally, the fusion of Christianity and European mores and Africa's tribes has created more discord than harmony.
Perhaps the saddest legacy of Africa is its invisibility -- the narrative voice of Heart of Darkness ends with Marlow telling a lie, just as the American media seldom shines a searing light upon the injustices in Rwanda and Darfur until it is too late. Today, America's Marlows still show more interest in 'our name' -- the implications of African policy for the West, such as the current AIDS epidemic in the region. Africa still suffers the consequences of the West seeing Africa as a Heart of Darkness, rather than a region with problems that need and deserve to be solved in its own right.
We must be cautious yet. The district is closed to us for a time. Deplorable! Upon the whole, the trade will suffer. […] Look how precarious the position is (Conrad 1902, p. 143). Otherwise, he notes, the ivory Kurtz collected is perfectly good. But in the face of months of strange rumors, the Company's refusal to check his activities earlier amounts to moral complicity; as Phil Zimbardo notes in a
This is because Conrad's vivid descriptions of the wild African jungles and meadows made it known that much of Africa remained untouched by human hands. The second term to be added is the adjective rich; even though this may be contradictory to the term poverty mentioned earlier, it is actually used here to mean the untapped and abundant natural resources that the continent possesses. These resources, one of which
Okonkwo's journey is one of self-imposed exile. So, too, is the journey of the Kurtz character in Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Coppola's Apocalypse Now. Thus, Kurtz takes the place of the protagonist as being the symbolic character catalyst in Heart of Darkness and Things Fall Apart. The Kurtz character is more similar to the Okonkwo character than either Marlow or Willard. For this reason, Kurtz can be considered a
Euro v Afro Centric Perspectives The unfolding of events can be told from a variety of perspectives that are highly influenced by an individual's background and personal prejudices. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe provide two distinct and polar perspectives. Heart of Darkness, and consequently the film adaptation Apocalypse Now, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, provides an Anglo-centric perspective on colonialism and imperialism, whereas
He makes the reader aware of these great changes by showing the wild backcountry, how the natives live, and how they are reacting to the Belgians in their midst. The backcountry Marlow travels through is sinister, and the natives become more sinister as well. These natives represent the evil they are fighting against and graphically illustrate what it has done to their culture. They have become violent and frightening
Conrad explores the vileness of imperialism in a cloak of goodwill with various approaches to the way in which Europeans and Africans are viewed in this novel. Heart of Darkness is a novella written by Joseph Conrad which has a strong autobiographical tone and discusses the dark side of imperialism with an underlying irony. Heart of Darkness was based on Conrad's journey to the Belgian Congo in 1890 where the Africans
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