Connecting Achebe and Heart of Darkness

Do you ever read a story and the descriptions are so vivid that you can picture the scenery and the characters? These are the best stores ever...

Achebe says that the most interesting and revealing parts of Conrad's Heart of Darkness are his descriptions of people. I agree and I would add the setting. Conrad gives precise details like the ones that we discussed in class on Tuesday.

While the descriptions sometimes are confusing and it is hard to distinguish what he is talking about because of the difficult language, they are still, I think, the best part of the novella and I think it is essential to think of Heart of Darkness in this way rather than looking at it solely as a difficult text that is hard to decipher. Here is an example that I like:

"...It was paddled by black fellows. You could see from afar the white of their eyeballs glistening. They shouted, sang; their bodies streamed with persperation; that ad faces like grotesque masks - these chaps; but they had bone, muscle, a wild vitality, an intense energy of movement, that was as natural and true as the surf along their coast. They wanted no excuse for being there. They were a great comfort to look at..."

While it may be hard to sometimes understand the signinficance of what descriptions Conrad decides to include and expound upon, one thing I noticed is that his descriptions of the native Congolese are the best. I think this is essential to accomplish what I think his goal is...to expose the situation of colonization in the Congo.

Heart of Darkness

As I read through Heart of Darkness, I was amazed at the tone of the narrator. He speaks in language that seems to me to reveal the situation in the Congo at the time. The writing is many times written awkwardly, or at least it seems that way to me. It is often unclear exactly what is happening, who is present, and why it is happening.

An example of this is in the second section of the story when Marlow tells the story of what he overheard on the steamboat. As he is lying down, he hears the manager and one of his nephews talking and begins to listen in. He figures out that they are talking about Kurtz and then later about someone who supposedly was with Kurtz. He grasps on to their feelings about these two persons and he decides to keep his curiosity to himself.

I think this obscurity of language aids Conrad in portraying the darkness that is eluded to in the title. As a reader of Marlow's tales of his journey, I am brought into the situation with the infrequent dialogue and sometimes careful descriptions of the surroudings. I think it helps me take on the feelings of fear, mistrust, confusion, etc. that Marlow was feeling. And as much as I don't like this style of writing, I do think it is genius on Conrad's part for taking the reader into the story of such an awful time in the history of Africa.