Dehumanization In Heart Of Darkness

The essay looks at Conrad’s negative portrayal of the local African population in Central Africa, examining the narrative purpose served by this type of representation and how Conrad sets up Africa and its people as an anti-pole to Europe and ‘civilization’. In order to do that, the local African is constantly dehumanized, deprived of his own language and forms of expression. One of the main focuses of Conrad’s work is to portray the European's mental disintegration against the background of the wilderness in the African continent.

Heart of Darkness contrasts the colonial world of the European, with that of the indigenous African peoples. Conrad uses a frame narrative charting the story of how Charles Marlow made his long and excruciating …show more content…
The majority of the Africans are portrayed as helpless individuals without any say in their fate. Near the start of Conrad’s novella, when in the Company’s offices, Marlow compares one of the black women there to a ‘somnambulist’; a sleepwalker, seemingly without any control over herself. In order to emphasise the apparent lack of civilization of the local Africans, Conrad even deprived them of their own language. Instead of speech, their language seems to him as ‘a violent babble of uncouth sounds’, while exchanging ‘short grunting phrases’. In the rare case when the African is actually quoted, it only serves as a device to expose more savagery — thus reinforcing the negative stereotype. This is when they request the body of a fellow native to “Eat ‘im!”, thus serving to confirm the white man’s impression of their supposed ‘inherent …show more content…
Although they, too, are not without criticism in Conrad’s depictions, each character nevertheless possesses a rich and distinct personality. When Marlow first meets the Accountant he recounts: “I met a white man in such an unexpected elegance of get-up that in the first moment I took him for a sort of vision”, later referring to him as a ‘miracle’. The words ‘phantom’ and ‘apparition’ are used elsewhere in the story while the white man is described as having a supernatural aura, also in connection with the representation of Kurtz, appearing as a god-like figure to the locals. This contrasts with how Marlow talks of the deceased African helmsman: “Perhaps you will think it passing strange this regret for a savage who was no more account than a grain of sand in a black Sahara”. There is a distinct lack of feeling, personality or dignity attributed to the Africans, in an endless and lifeless desert. “The thought of their humanity - like yours - the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly.” Although Marlow struggles with the idea that the local Africans are less than fully human, the idea of comparing their form of humanity to his is so intolerable to him, characterising it as