In the eye of the beholder

The Congo RiverThe first hand account is quite possibly the most important aspect of traveling. It is often the first hand account that inspires others to travel. Hearing a story of a friends visit to a foreign country can create a desire to have a similar experience. However, we often forget when reading travel essays that it is just one person’s opinion. Someone may rave about Rome and how the people are so friendly and open to strangers, but your experience could have been something completely different. Conrad himself traveled to the Congo, but does that mean that his account of his travels should be taken as a fact? The personal account of a visit anywhere is just that, a personal account. A story that was just one persons’ experience. This isn’t to say that Conrad was wrong and the savagery of imperialism didn’t exist, because clearly that would be going too far. However, Achebe’s critique of Conrad is that he doesn’t trust him, he refuses to “trust the evidence even of a man's very eyes when I suspect them to be as jaundiced as Conrad’s”. Achebe believes that Conrad was a racist hiding behind the liberal narrator when those were not his findings. While Achebe brings some proof for his findings, Conrad’s views of Africans are almost not as important as the bigger issue that Conrad brings up. Heart of Darkness is a fictional, first hand account of a man’s journey. He exploits the influence of a first hand account to lead his readers to a specific reaction. Conrad is able to tap into the open market of human’s desire to explore foreign lands. A large part of the book’s success is due to the fact that it was a travel novel. This detail often gets glossed over, as the book is mostly known as a critique of imperialism. However, it is important to remember that the details of the environment were most likely based on what Conrad saw. The book is rich with detailed imagery of the landscape, and it is in this landscape the reader gets immersed in this jungle in the Congo. Without the images that Conrad describes, the book would be like most other politically charged novels, and it probably wouldn’t be as gripping and appealing. It’s that first hand account that hooks the reader and advances the political aims.