It makes a point, after all, of showing the destructive effects the colonial effort has on the psyche of both its narrator and its focal point, Kurtz, and goes to lengths to question the virtue of apparently-less-than-well-meaning Europeans. The novella, which likely has Conrad’s many gifts as a prose stylist to thank for its (comparatively) recent longevity, has, in general, been read as a scathing critique of European colonialism in Africa. And with it comes a varying range of views, critiques, and feelings. It remains, today, one of the most ubiquitous items on college course syllabi around the United Sates. Over the course of the past century, however, Conrad’s once-obscure work about a young man, Marlow, taking a trip down the Congo River, has become one of the most-assigned and most-discussed pieces in the canon. It was initially passed over in favor of works like Youth: A Narrative (1902) and The End of the Tether (1902) that history has largely left to fester. Of the three pieces of writing all bound into the single volume in which Heart of Darkness was sold, what would come to be the author’s most famous work received the least critical attention. It remains controversial and challenging - even divisive - today.During Joseph Conrad’s lifetime, little fuss was made over his 1899 novella Heart of Darkness. This was a view that shocked, startled, stimulated, and colored all subsequent opinions of Conrad. Achebe maintained that the novel's racism left it permanently tainted. As such it could never be considered a great work of art, as had consistently been claimed in the West. Achebe believed that even as original and subtle a work as Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness - a novel seen by many as a criticism of colonialism and one that Achebe admired stylistically - reflected these assumptions.įor Achebe, Heart of Darkness was a book shot through with racist preconceptions that belittled and demeaned both Africa and Africans.
When confronted by what it took to be an inferior culture, the West identified itself as better - materially, intellectually, even spiritually. Nigerian novelist and professor Chinua Achebe was acutely conscious that Western views of Africa were inevitably the views of a culture that assumed itself superior.
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