Heart of Darkness & Nostromo

The essential link between Joseph Conrad's novels Heart of Darkness and Nostromo is that they share the theme of Europeans entering a Third World nation in order to "save" the nation and its people in some way, but merely end up spreading their inevitably corrupting influences. Nostromo is far more complex (and much longer) work than Heart of Darkness, and uses a more intricate chronology, but the soul of the stories are the same in their portrayals of the spread of Western influences in Africa and Latin America. This is not to say that Conrad has an idealized understanding of the lives and societies in the Third World nations he fictionally examines. To the contrary, those societies are full of strife, violence, and their own brands of non-western corruption. However, what the white man brings is far worse, far more violent and corrupting, despite the fact that he seems to believe that he will be "saving" the black man or the brown man from himself and his "backward" culture. If there is a message to the two works, it is that the people of Africa and Latin America deserved to be left alone to work out their own destinies, whatever they might be, rather than to have the values and culture of the European imposed upon them.

Conrad does not show the Europeans to be wholly evil any more than he shows the Contaguanans to be wholly good. When Charles Gould comes to Costaguana to reopen the silver mine, it is clear that he has high hopes not only for the economy of the place, but

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the void, the bleak fact that the theatre of our destiny is a neutral and disregarding universe (Stewart 164-165). In Heart of Darkness, it is through Marlow that the reader finds out about Kurtz and the evil that Kurtz has fallen into. Marlow is a sane man, a good man, and the reader can identify with him as he goes deeper into the jungle and meets Kurtz. Kurtz stands for colonialism and the destruction it does (with good intentions), and Marlow stands for passive colonialism. He does nothing to stop what Kurtz does and even ends up admiring Kurtz. Marlow's relative innocence is important because he has to come to a new view of life in the same way that the reader does. In the same way, Nostromo, Gould and Decoud, for example, slowly come to realize that their best intentions lead only to destruction. In both novels, the main characters are profoundly changed, never for the better, by what they find about the world and about how human beings can be cruel, evil and insane. All the characters learn that much evil is done in the name of goodness. Both novels leave the reader with a pessimistic, if mysterious, sense of the reality of the human enterprise. Kurtz sees the "horror" in life (Conrad Heart 75), and Marlow is deeply chan

Category: Literature - H