An Analysis of Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

My view on “The Heart of Darkness” automatically came to me as a racial story, which encourages racism. The wording used in the story such as, light and dark made it seem like Joseph Conrad was referring to people of darker skin color as “monstrous” and “inhuman”. “The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there – there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were – No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it – this suspicion of their not being inhuman.” (Pg.13). Throughout the reading the main character Marlow says how they would go to places where Africans were fee and it seemed “unearthly” to them. This quote shows how people of a darker skin color were discriminated against and were considered a lower class of people. Usually an author will incorporate certain things into their writing to make a point that people are constantly overlooking the racism, power, femininity, identity, madness, and even fate. This does in fact alter the way a person thinks and views the world. Chinua Achebe helps prove my claim that Conrad is putting a view into reader’s minds that racism is not a bad thing but people of color “deserve” and should be shackled without any freedom. On page 4 Achebe elaborates on the way Conrad uses a prehistoric earth and shows how he uses it as the place where people of color are free. Prehistoric, meaning those people should not be free how they once were. However, a website that had a blog written by Selby Evans disagrees with Achebe by stating, “Quite early in his argument, Achebe writes, “Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as “the other world”, the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where a man’s vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality”(Achebe 783). One must ask, however, whose bestiality is triumphant. In my opinion, it is not the image of