heart of darkness
In the Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad utilizes many characters to tell his story of the Congo colonisation. He portrays the horrors and inhumane activities of the Congo throughout these characters and by doing so, attributes an importance to each and every one of them. Interestingly, Conrad does not assign any names to his characters except for the two most important ones: Marlow and Kurtz. Even though Marlow only hears about Kurtz throughout the novel, and does not meet him until the end, Kurtz is by far the most representative character in the story. He is the representative of greed, power, inhumanity, evil and loss of self control. He will indeed strike many readers as insane and immoral. The environment of the jungle and the background history of the Congo will lead to his insanity and cause Kurtz’s downfall. Heart of Darkness is set in the heart of the Congo in a time when the Belgian empire had started to conquer it. The story portrays a Belgian company which has set itself in the Congo, in order to retrieve ivory from the native blacks. The Europeans conquering the Congo are of Christian religion, whereas the native blacks are polytheist, and carry out an uncivilized way of life. Besides retrieving ivory, the Belgians also want to convert the blacks to Christianity. In an ironic turn of events, the Christian Europeans, who are supposed to be moral and ethical in every point of view, end up torturing and mistreating the black natives in order to get ivory and satisfy their greed.