Conrad's Africa

      Heart of Darkness finally comes to its closure after diving through the dense, African, jungle taking us deep into the idea of darkness itself in our journey to the unknown. Conrad does an excellent job describing the mysterious jungle by giving life to it through detail and imagery bringing an interesting paralel in the setting of the novel.

      Conrad writes the book as a story within a story. In both occasions we are set in a river, at one point in the Thames then the story unfolds in the Congo.  The beginning of the novel brought the idea of the magnificence of the Thames river and how it'd led explorers to meet great destinies across mysterious and dark places around the world. Then it touched a very interesting paralel that could be related to that of the Congo. England was a dark and mysterious place once and this same river led explorers hundreds of years before to discover a land full fog, scary darkness, uncivilized natives, and mystery. The Romans here where the explorers bringing civilization to what was considered a dark place. Then he showed us a different darkness.

     There was a description I considered important in shaping my final definition of darkness. Conrad relates it to the unknown as we see the deeper we go in the jungle the heavier darkness we find, He then makes a distinct exception to introduce a profounder darkness. He makes reference to "the heart of an immense darkness" leading up through the Thames. This leads us to another crucial idea portrayed across the novel. The european thought of superiority and excellence and their lack of knowledge and interest in the natives is in itself the greatest darkness of all. The ignorance with which they live with lays deep in the heart of darkness of a world which few take time to understand and all take time to judge with outright ignorance. The African stereotype and the single story in European mentality is the heart of darkness.

Inhumane to Humane

    As Heart of Darkness progresses, so do our characters. We now see open criticism to imperialism as the idea Marlow had embedded in his head is challenged by the true reality of the natives he's come to meet. To his surprise these cruel demon spawns that live in this despicable place have much more to them and we now find strong contradictions between what Marlow wants to believe and what he's experiencing around him.

"He was an improved specimen...He ought to have been clapping his hands and stamping his feet on the bank, instead of which he was hard at work...full of improving knowledge."

     Marlow is referring to the steam operator in his boat. The native or poor devil, as he calls him, is challenging the African stereotype of ignorance and erratic behavior. As his own thought process in obscured by this strange fellow he comes back to justify this explaining the man has been instructed and thats all to it. It doesn't come to his own merit as he is still a local devil, it was the europeans that taught him and took advantage of this naive creature. What Marlow can't see is that his own ideas are struggling to keep the colonial mentality weaved together and maybe as he progresses through Part III he'll understand reality in its true perspective.