Post-Colonial Analysis of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

Abstract

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness tells the journey of Marlow through the African jungle and his search for the European Kurtz who exploits the natives by imposing violence on them. It is mainly based upon Conrad's own experience in Congo when he learned how Europeans exploited and traded the natives for their own benefits during his own journey. The book is regarded as an attack on imperialism and criticizes immoral treatments of the European colonizers in Africa in the 19 th century. Keith Booker states that "the book deals with issues such as imperialism, capitalism, race, and gender that were very much at the forefront of the turn-of-the century European mind. Conrad's ambivalent treatment of these issues is extremely representative of the way they were treated in any number of European discourses of the time" (217). Besides, Chinua Achebe in his An "Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness" comments that "Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as 'the other world', the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man's vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality" (338). Although Achebe puts forward that the novel displays colonialism, I consider that Conrad does not intend to write it to appreciate colonialism and therefore the purpose of this paper is to approach Conrad's Heart of Darkness from post-colonial perspective by taking European imperialism and colonialism over Africa into consideration in order to clarify how Conrad has

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“…The findings of the study show that the author has announced the decolonized culture of America in his work. Güven (2013) carried out a study to analyze Conrad's Heart of Darkness from the viewpoint of postcolonialism. The aim of the researcher is to explore and justify that Conrad has deconstructed the concept of the binary opposition of Europeans, and he did not appreciate the process of colonization.…”

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“…It is discussed that one of the causes for savagery in the western conversation in Africa to prevail was to vindicate Africans to be rudimentary, and so, they must be colonized and socialized (Sharmin, 2018, p. 6). Guven (2013) illustrates that when the natives equaled to the Europeans they are viewed as inferior and this is the only reality for them, yet Conrad suggests that this rejected during the novel over after his experiments in Africa disagree with the general doctrine concerning colonialism in England. Marlow is selected by Conrad to illustrate the European colonialism actualities, that is, natives' position told during Marlow, a European as well as.…”