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Conrad and Africa

setting as a device to make the reader keep reading. He makes serious use of the water to establish a mood that will allow him to say something special about the ambiguities and ironies of personal and political ethics, honor, morality, and even madness that is connected to the relationship of his characters to the water. Thus, the river enables Marlow's adventure as well as Belgium's adventure; in Marlow's case, however, the river alters forever his experience of life. Similarly, the river can be said to stand between Kurtz and sanity in Heart of Darkness. For Belgium, which eventually withdrew from the Congo in an environment of anti-European violence, the river can be said to have functioned as both temptation away from geopolitical justice and a barrier between it and justice. Indeed, by the end of the twentieth century, it is clear that the shape of African and Asian colonies of late nineteenth-century Europe were pretty good predictors of what was to become anticolonialist violence and other upheaval. Consider for example the well-documented Boxer Rebellion of China in 1900, where indigenous peoples faced off American and multiple European colonial ambitions all at once; the French, Japanese, French again, and finally American failures against persistent twentieth-century Vietnamese nationalism; the French failure in Algeria; the squalid British withdrawals from Egypt, the Sudan, Rhodesia, and South Africa.

Heart of Darkness is consistent with predictions of failure of the European colonial project in Africa. The action of the story turns on the colonial authority and the opportunity for individual corruption and insanity alike implicit in it. Marlow, who tells the story of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, is one aspect of this. He explains that his experience as a sailor is darker and more alien than that of most of his mates. As he contemplates the progress of his ship Nellie along the tidal Thames toward the sea, he sets the dark...

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Conrad and Africa. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 19:08, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1706473.html