Colonization And The Heart Of Darkness

3 Pages 864 Words

In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness he tells the story of a young man who gets involved in the ivory trade for the money. Marlow, the main character, recounts his experiences to a group of men he is sailing with and tells of a man named Kurtz and of the native people to Africa. He gives many visual images of the Congo, relates the impacts of colonization on the colonizers and those of the colonized.
The entire novel is dark and almost depressing in a way. Marlow describes the Congo around him and almost always it is dark and seemingly scary. The first image Marlow describes is that of the first place he lands in Africa. There are slaves there, making a railroad. He says, “a rocky cliff appeared, mounds of turned-up earth by the shore, houses on a hill, others with iron roods, amongst a waste of excavations, or hanging to the declivity…[I] found a path leading up the hill. It turned aside for the boulders, and also for an undersized railway-truck” (Conrad 23). The image of a cliff gives the image of a dry, desert life place, which is what I would imagine Africa to be. Later he describes the area going up the river. “The great wall of vegetation, an exuberant and entangled mass of trunks, branches, leaves, boughs, festoons, motionless in the moonlight, was like a rioting invasion of soundless life, a rolling wave of plants, piled up, crested, ready to topple over the creek, to sweep every little man of us out of his little existence” (Conrad 49). This describes a lavish rainforest, something I would picture once a rainforest was mentioned. Initially, thinking of Africa, I wouldn’t imagine rainforests but lean more towards his first description, of a dry, desert-like area. Marlow gives quite the picture of this new place he’s traveling in, giving the ready a picture perfect idea of where he is.
Marlow describes the colonizers as mean and power-hungry. He focuses mainly on one man by the name of Kurtz. For most of the ...