Prompt #8 Heart of Darkness

In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad shows Africa through the perspective of the colonizing Europeans, who tend to depict all the natives as savages. European prejudice against Africans is clearly present in Heart of Darkness. In traveling through Africa, the protagonist, Marlow, describes all the natives he encounters as savages, comparing them to animals or the wilderness of the jungle itself. In one instance, Marlow discovers a death pit literally an open grove where natives go to die. He describes the men there saying, "Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees, leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth in all attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair they were nothing earthly now, nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation. One of these creatures rose to his hands and knees and went off on all fours towards the river to drink." This portrayal shows the natives as "shadows" and unearthly "creatures," not as dying men. The men are not individuals, but rather formless shapes with no humanizing characteristic to distinguish one man from another. None of the men are shown personally and so it is difficult to discern where one man ends and the next begins. This creates the effect that the men are nothing more than elements. It is this detail that creates the crucial characterization that Heart of Darkness embodies.