Sunday, June 2, 2019

Essay Contrasting Images in Things Fall Apart and Heart of Darkness

Contrasting Images in Things Fall Apart and core group of shabbiness Joseph Conrads novel Heart of Darkness portrays an image of Africa that is dark and inhuman. Not only does he describe the actual, physical continent of Africa as so hopeless and so dark, so impenetrable to human thought, so pitiless to human weakness (Conrad 94), as though the continent could neither breed nor support whatsoever true human life, but he also manages to depict Africans as though they are not worthy of the respect commonly due to the face cloth man. At one point the main character, Marlow, describes one of the paths he follows Cant say I saw whatever road or any upkeep, unless the body of a middle-aged negro, with a bullet-hole in the forehead, upon which I absolutely stumbled three miles farther on, may be considered as a permanent feeler (48). Conrads description of Africa and Africans served to misinform the Western world, and went uncontested for many years. In 1958 Chinua Achebe publishe d his first and most widely acclaimed novel, Things Fall Apart. This workcommonly declare as the single most well known African novel in the worlddepicts an image of Africa that humanizes both the continent and the people. Achebe once said, Reading Heart of Darkness . . . I realized that I was one of those savages jumping up and down on the beach. Once that kind of enlightenment comes to you, you realize that someone has to save up a different story (Gikandi 8-9) Achebe openly admits that he wrote Things Fall Apart because of the horrible characterization of Africans in many European works, especially Heart of Darkness. In many ways, Chinua Achebes Things Fall Apart can be seen as an Afrocentric rebuttal to the Eurocentric depiction ... ...in Heart of Darkness. Works Cited Achebe, Chinua. An Image of Africa Racism in Conrads Heart of Darkness. Heart ofDarkness An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Sources, Essays in Criticism. 3rded. Ed. Robert Kimbrough. New York W.W. Norton, 1 988. 251-262.---. Things Fall Apart. Greenwich Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1959.Boahen, A. Adu. African Perspectives on Colonialism. Baltimore The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. London Penguin Books, 1989.Doctrines on Colonialism. The Government of Tibet in Exile. 3 May 2000. <http//www.tibet.com/Humanrights/Unpo/chap2.html>. Gikandi, Simon. Chinua Achebe and the Invention of African Literature. Classics in Context Things Fall Apart. Chinua Achebe. Portsmouth Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1996.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.