The Other World

Approaching the Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness is essentially about colonialism: the way that one group of people can take over another group of people.  Its a strange twist on the traveler’s tale.  Heart of Darkness is a horror story of a people who are consumed and controlled by travelers.  There is a theme of traveler versus native in Heart of Darkness that may be evident in the other books we’ve read, but at a much lesser level.  In Heart of Darkness the natives and the travelers will kill each other, whereas in the Sun Also Rises the natives have an unspoken distaste for the travelers.

Africa, “the other world”, is represented in Heart of Darkness as, the center of the earth, a place so wild that men who go there don’t usually come back.  At the core of Africa is a heart of darkness.  In the article, “An Image of Africa” by Chinua Achebe, the author speaks as if Conrad’s goal when writing the novel was to brainwash all readers into believing that Africa is horrible place.  As I read Heart of Darkness, I didn’t get that feeling.  I understood that Marlow was racist, immoral and outdated and I could weed through that, past the authors intentions, which are questionable but not known, to get the depth of the story, which I find is much more about corruption and colonialism than about Africa.

However, Africa is a huge part of the story.  As Achebe writes, “Africa as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril.”  I can’t disagree that this is how Africa is represented.  The travelers in the story don’t respect Africa, they don’t appreciate it as a destination.  Marlow wants to be in Africa because he wants to explore the heart of darkness, to challenge himself as a sailor and as a traveler.  His desire to be in Africa stems from disrespect of the place, not respect.  He wants to conquer the land, not learn to live with the natives.  The other white men he meets have similar goals, or usually, they’re only interested in money.  Marlow says that he’s different from the other white men, but clearly they all want the same thing, to conquer and pillage the land.

The act of traveling in Heart of Darkness is far from the act of being a tourist in Europe.  Its hard to disagree that Marlow is a traveler to the core, regardless of his intentions in Africa.