The Heart of Darkness Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

The Heart of Darkness - Essay ExampleAs he traveled from the Outer Station to the Central Station and then up the river to the Inner Station, he saw torture, cruelty, and near-slavery. The men who work for the Company, saying that what they were doing as trade, and their behavior towards native Australian Africans as part of the civilizing process, were making those ignorant African people stop their horrid, barbaric ways. Kurtz is the symbol of European imperialism in the story. His vicious honesty led him to his end, as the evil practices of Europeans in Africa were in danger of exposure through his accomplishment. He is did not hide the fact that he took ivory by force and tempered the natives with wildness and intimidation. He represented imperialism in its entirety in Africa. Kurtzs voraciousness for ivory represented Europes desire for the whole world. This greed made him the animal that Marlow found. Kurtz is imperialism and his life in the Congo represented imperialism an d the eventual destruction European imperialism itself. On page 14 of Part 3, Conrad described Kurt as the imperialist he had been. I thought his memory was like the other memories of the dead that accumulate in every mans lifea vague impress on the brain of shadows that had fallen on it in their swift and final passage but before the high and ponderous door, in the midst of the tall supports of a street as still and decorous as a well-kept alley in a cemetery, I had a mental imagery of him on the stretcher, opening his mouth voraciously, as if to devour all the earth with all its mankind. He lived then before me he lived as much as he had ever liveda shadow insatiable of splendid appearances, of frightful realities a shadow darker than the shadow of the night, and draped nobly in the folds of a beautiful eloquence. The vision of Kurt in the stretcher opening his mouth voraciously as if to devour all the earth and all its mankind signified the torture, cruelty, intimidation, vio lence and insatiable greed that come with the process of civilizing the natives by imperialists, the ultimate purpose of having the world in their hands. In this sense, Kurtzs personality was a symbol of the imperial goal of Europe. There is a striking similarity between the history book King Leopolds Ghost, by Adam Hochschild and Conrads the Heart of Darkness. It seems that Leon Rom of the Force Republique was the identical of Kurtz character. The collection of African heads surrounding Kurtzs house, and Roms collections, represent the villainy of both characters. Adam Hochschild, in his book said the following The Inner Station of Heart of Darkness, the step forward Marlow looks at through his binoculars only to find Kurtzs collection of the shrunken heads of African rebels, is loosely based on Stanley Falls. In 1895, five years later Conrad visited this post, Leon Rom was station chief there. A British explorer-journalist who passed through Stanley Falls that year described t he aftermath of a punitive military expedition against slightly African rebels Many women and children were taken, and twenty-one heads were brought to the falls, and have been used by Captain Rom as a decoration round a flower-bed in front of his house If Conrad missed this account, which appeared in the widely read Century Magazine, he almost certainly noticed when The Saturday Review, a magazine he admired and read faithfully,