Heart of Darkness IV

Marlow concludes the book by illustrating how being in the darkness has affected who he is today. He has ventured up to the edge of the Abyss; due to looking at Kurtz, he was able to avoid falling in, but he still stands on the edge. Despite how he hates to lie, being in the darkness has caused him to do so. Deception slowly crescendos into a full-blown lie. At first, he is simply avoiding the truth with ambiguous statements such as "he was a remarkable man" and "his end [. . .] was in every way worthy of his life" (161, 163). His statements while the girl interpreted them as praising Kurtz, could equally well, and, given Marlow's perspective and the story that has just been told, should be taken as a criticism of Kurtz. His double-meaning statements show a deception that approaches a lie that one would guess him to abhor based on his earlier claim about his contempt for lies, which in turn shows how being in the Congo has changed him and moved him towards the darkness, how he has not yet fully left the abyss. These deceptions sharpen to a point when he directly lies about Kurtz' last words; here, it becomes dreadfully clear that the journey has changed him to the point where he will lie despite his former honesty, where he remains in the darkness despite having been so far from it prior to his journey. In this way, Conrad makes it painfully clear that although Marlow had Kurtz as a warning so as to know not to fall into the abyss, Marlow has not yet left the abyss, and so remains darkly pragmatic.

Heart of Darkness III

The extent to which Conrad removes agency from the Africans is so complete that it must have been a conscious decision rather than a subconscious act of racism; the details that Chinua Achebe saw that generated her paper were so overwhelmingly obvious in some places that it is hyperbolic, and therefore sarcastic - therefore, Conrad was not a racist, for he consciously chose a point of view that is more extreme than any racism in real life. His use of metonymy and synecdoche to represent the blacks is so complete that it must have been deliberate. At one point, for instance, Marlow narrates that "the bush began to howl" (121); it might have made more sense, logically, to say "the Africans began to howl," but Marlow goes so far out of his way to take agency away from the Africans themselves that it would seem impossible that Conrad did not intentionally exaggerate Marlow's racism and detachment from the Africans. At other points, Marlow refers to components of a body to mean an African, such as "human limbs [. . .] of bronze color" (121). Marlow almost never speaks of the Africans directly, instead referring to them by something related - for instance, a part of their body or environment. This is so consistent and so deliberate that it must have been a conscious choice by Conrad - were it simply underlying racism in his opinion, then he would not go so far from a conventional way of speaking in order to take away the Africans' agency; such an effort could not be subconscious. Therefore, either Conrad deliberately chose to remove the Africans' agency because he genuinely believes the Africans to be less aware of what they are doing than animals, who would have agency, and is therefore a highly extreme racist, even for the late 1800s, calling blacks not merely animals, but less than animals; or he made a conscious decision to do so to exaggerate the general viewpoint of the people of the time in a criticism. Therefore, it is unlikely that the evidence Chinua Achebe presents to indicate his racism (e.g. the use of black parts of the body to represent black people) is anything other than the author using hyperbole upon the viewpoint of the time.

Heart of Darkness II

A brief analysis of Chinua Achebe's "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'" reveals that her paper should be read with some caution. First is that her paper is not fully accurate. For instance, she states the falsehood that the Great Wall of China is the only man-made object visible from the moon; in fact, it is not visible from the moon, due to its width (despite its length), and other man-made objects are visible from a significantly higher height than it. Whether or not this should indicate to a reader that she has not done all of the research is up to the discretion of the reader, but it does cast a shadow of a doubt on the inherent reliability portrayed by her position as a professor, as she has not done the research to recognize that at least one statement she claims in her paper to be true is false. Secondly, and more important than a minor inaccuracy, is her clear bias, as a teacher of African literature; given her position, she is inherently in a place to criticize others for their racism. While she is also in a better position than most to see the issues with society, her perspective undoubtedly also makes her overly perceptive, sometimes seeing racism where there is none. Both of these should be considered when reading her paper, but neither of them detracts from her main point of the general excessive focus of Joseph Conrad on race.

One might argue, as some have, that this focus is that of Marlow, not of Conrad. The issue, however, is more complex: present-day Marlow is likely obfuscating some facts to make his past self look better, and Conrad is likely doing the same. The analogue between Marlow and Conrad is quite multifaceted, and therefore it would seem likely that the author is, to at least some extent, represented in this narrator. However, despite that Marlow, as a narrator, is likely hiding some of the evils belonging to the earlier iteration of Marlow, he does not hide his own racism and thoughts of the continent as primitive and base, still claiming that "going up th[e] river was like travelling [sic] back to the earliest beginnings of the world" (105). Marlow does not consider racism to be immoral, and so does not try to hide it. Considering the equivalency between Marlow and Conrad, it seems likely that Conrad similarly does not believe racism to be immoral. That he does not have Marlow hide it means that Marlow did not learn that racism is wrong during his travels; regardless of whether the character is identical to the author, it is clear that their stories of their travels are parallel, and therefore that the lessons that Conrad learns would be transferred to Marlow. As Marlow did not learn a lesson about racism, as evidenced by the racism Marlow displays as a narrator, it would seem that to be against racism is not a lesson that the Congo had to offer; Conrad would not have learned this lesson either, or else he would have transferred it to Marlow, presuming Marlow would have learned it as well, having gone on a similar journey. Therefore, regardless of her bias and her paper's full accuracy, Chinua Achebe does have a point in referring to Conrad's racism, especially with respect to the lack of prior literature; despite the difficulty of withdrawing conclusions from the intricately layered narrative, it would seem that Marlow's racism is not a result of who Marlow is as a character, but rather of who Conrad is as a person.

Heart Of Darkness I

At the very beginning of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad establishes a symbolic representation of light and dark that contrasts with most books' use of this motif. Whereas most traditional works of literature will use the color white, light and brightness to symbolize illumination of the truth, similarly using the color black, darkness and shadow to symbolize hiding the truth, Heart of Darkness uses light to symbolize what is unknown and black to symbolize what is discovered. Maslow exemplifies this symbol with his statement that Africa "had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery - a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness" (71). Maslow is speaking of the white portion of the map as the unexplored portion and of the explored portion as a "place of darkness." In this way, he matches whiteness with a lack of knowledge. This indicates that the white people are similarly unknowing - that whites are unaware of the world. With Heart of Darkness being a story of the discovery of the evil of humanity, the whites' being unaware of this evil contrasts with the perspective of those who live in darkness - the blacks.

Furthermore, the general  scene sets this image. The scene is one of light turning to darkness - of sunset. Similarly, his story is about to transform the sailors from their white, light, unknowing selves to a darker crew more aware of the evils of humanity. The sun is described as in a "curved and imperceptible fall" (66). The sun is slowly going away, turning "from glowing white [in]to a dull red without rays and without heat" (66). In other words, the light is dimming, going from white to black. While the sailors hear his story and are "enlightened" (although an inverse term would seem to better fit with this symbol) to the evils of humanity, the sun drops below the horizon. As the shadows of knowledge overcome the white areas on their moral map, night sweeps over them, ending their light, blissful day with the dark truth.