f god and half king, half aggrandized and half in physical peril. The irony of his position is that he is a captive god and partly that he has lost whatever irony he possessed, giving himself over to "horror." But the content of the horror remains ambiguous, thus implicating equally the European and indigenous cultures in the Congo, as well as the human frailties of the individuals involved in the Kurtz matter. In that regard, the African writer Chinua Achebe criticizes Conrad's portrayal of the Congolese people as Eurocentric.
People will tell you [Conrad] was opposed to imperialism. But it's not enough to say . . . "I'm opposed to these people . . . being treated like this." Especially since he goes on straight away to call them "dogs standing on their hind legs." . . . Animal imagery throughout. He didn't see anything wrong with it (Achebe 144).
Such criticism argues that Conrad's alien hero is an entitled observer, entitled because European. Each in their way, Conrad, Marlow, and Kurtz are implicated in deliberate victimization of colonized peoples,
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