Heart Of Darkness Rhetorical Analysis

Madison Verschleiser
English

Emergence into an Animal Kingdom

In Heart of Darkness what initially stuck out to me was the extent in which Joseph Conrad describes the un-human like qualities of Africans. At one point in the excerpt Conrad calls africans a “prehistoric man”, and at another point describes the way in which the Africans live as a “madhouse”. It seemed to me as if he was not looking at a people rather Conrad was looking onto Africans as if they were caged animals simply there as a resource for Conrad and his men. The overall condescending nature of the excerpt frankly made the passages difficult for me to read. Mainly it called into question for me how a person can look at another human being as somehow innately inferior to himself.
What really made it seem like Conrad was describing a new species or some some sort of animal species was the extreme way in which he described the actions of the Africans he encountered.
A like that particularly stuck out to me was when Conrad says, “The howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces,”. This statement is contrasted by the way in which Conrad describes his group of men as, “glide(ing) past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be…”.. The description of Conrad’s own men is so exponentially different than that of the Africans. Not only does Conrad make a point to describe his men as “sane” but also describes their actions as that of resembling “phantoms”. Not only does this describe characterize the group of White men as something greater than human the word “phantom” when prescribed to a person tends to mean a person who blends in with their
surroundings. The most literal meaning of “phantom” is a figment of the imagination or a ghost. If one uses either of these definition one is still lead to the same conclusion, that the White men did not impose on the natives lifestyle. In fact when the group of men first arrive at the village Conrad says of one of the Africans he made into his worker, “He was an improved specimen,” and even a more powerful description, “to look at him was edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat walking on his hind-legs,”. While both these comment tell what was likely an uninformed reader that the African inhabitants of these villages benefitted from the Whites presence the second quote goes as far as to that Conrad and his men made a more human species out of the Africans. This can be understood primarily through the word “edifying,”. This word means providing moral and intellectual instruction, alluding to the fact the Africans were lacking these things and therefore Conrad and his men to essentially teach them how to be human beings. This idea is extremely different than Achebe’s description of the villages. Unlike Conrad, Achebe set out to prove the humanness of the African villagers.
He does but doing the exact opposite of Conrad; writing from an outsider’s point of view and writing out the order, tradition, and logic of the villages. In addition in Heart of Darkness Conrad writes about how the he and his men enlightened the villages, whereas in Things Fall Apart Achebe portrays the negative effects of the White man’s arrival. Not only is there very little mention of the “edifying” of the Africans in Things Fall Apart, but Achebe makes a point to include sections about the violence and cruelty of the White men, and how the presence of the White man was destroying families and years of
tradition. A very easy way to see the difference in perspectives between these two novels is in their title’s. Heart of Darkness has a very negative connotation to it, it means to say the african’s were living amidst darkness in the sense of animalistic and improper human behavior and that Conrad and his men where the light. The title Things Fall Apart alludes not to the a negative way of life, but that even good things will fall apart at the hands of other men.