NRJ #2-Imperialism

The theme of imperialism appears throughout Heart of Darkness and plays out through the eyes of Marlow. As Marlow ventures deeper and deeper into the Congo and further away from what he knows as civilization he slowly realizes the gravity of the destruction of man and nature that is occurring due to British imperialism. As he goes deeper he is getting closer to the truth about imperialism. In the story the British Empire is at its peak and its incessant desire for goods such as ivory and rubber cause them to ignore the inalienable rights of every man. Conrad wanted to show the dark side of imperialism in the name of progress. He accomplished that by showing the brutalities the workers suffered to bring those goods to the civilized world. A wealthy Duke in England with an ivory staircase did not see the atrocities that occurred to extract the ivory, and as an arrogant imperialist he did not care.
Marlow doesn’t really believe in the idea of imperialism but he still profits from The Company, which symbolizes everything that is wrong with the idea of unbridled imperialism. The narrator defines imperialism when he states “the conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, it is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.” (5).
Kurtz himself was considered a model imperialist but he succumbs to and dies as almost a savage, the very people that imperialist oppressed and considered less than a man. It has come full circle. Conrad accomplished his goal to shine the light on the darkness of man and what we are capable of and imperialism was darkness and brutality personified.

NRJ #1-Nature Vs Man

Throughout Conrad’s Heart of Darkness he illustrates the theme of nature versus man by contrasting the white European man’s idea of civilization with that of the primitive natives in the Congo. I am utilizing the theme of nature versus man in the sense of how a civilized and cultured man can revert to the savagery of his natural primal roots when put in situations such as what Marlow and Kurtz experienced. The character of Marlow is used as a conduit to which these two worlds can be seen through his eyes. He witnesses the morbid treatment of the natives as a wrongful act by his own people, the whites, who see the natives as filthy and savage. He then sees Kurtz, a seemingly civilized man, in a state of near madness and acting as a savage. The story would make you think that Kurtz went mad, but in actuality he is merely reverting to what is natural for someone when they are taken away from the cultured world and put into a savage, intolerable and uncivilized society. Marlow comments that “you thought yourself bewitched and cut off for ever from everything you had known once….in another existence perhaps”(2.34). The jungle with its natural darkness and mysteries are a prime location for cultured men to lose their civilized self. It is indeed another existence.
When Marlow is traveling on the river toward the Inner Station he sees and hears the natives and he feels sort of a connection with the natives as he comments “but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity-like yours- the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar” (2.36). He sees the natives as a primordial adaptation of his own self, but he stops short of saying that they can be equal to the modern cultured man. The white man in Heart of Darkness feels he is doing the correct thing to civilize the natives, but in reality the white man is being de-civilized by the natives as well. The dilemma of Heart of Darkness is that we all have a form of a primal man inside of us that can be stressed out of us if we are put in an isolationist and savage situation.