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The Presence of "The Other" in Heart of Darkness and Ulysses
The Africans in the Heart of Darkness
It is an imbedded story of an adventurous Englishman who undertakes a journey into the primitive Congan jungle in order to rescue a strangely successful Ivory merchant, Kurtz, from the dangers posed by the unknown African people, the greed of his Belgian colleagues, and his own base instincts. Through the narrator, Charlie Marlow, Conrad challenges the rapacious Belgian imperialists, specifically King Leopold II's company, who according to Conrad are destroying the Congo and its inhabitants in their desperate materialism and quest for ivory. Within the novel Conrad presents the Belgium Company as destructive, greedy, and inept and an ultimately immoral force.
In addition, he criticizes the leech like nature of the Company employees who are essentially passive and do not contribute to the company.
African American Read-In 2013
African American Read-In 2013In the novel, however, it is possible to see, when reading through a Post-colonial lens, that Conrad presents the Africans as animalistic and inhuman as a means of garnering reader sympathy for their decay as a result of imperialism. Furthermore, the text only exists within a masculine point of view; therefore the representation of the feminine is distorted. By assuming a feminist reading, it is apparent that women within the novel are presented as an inferior gender and are always defined in terms of their male counterpart. Each of the different reading practices produces its own unique interpretations of the text, allowing different ideas to be extracted from the novel.
While adhering to the dominant reading of the "Heart of Darkness", the novel can be read as criticism of the treatment of the natives by the Belgians. Through the narrator Marlow,