Empire and Ambivalence in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness is a novel which is written by Joseph Conrad and many students of literature and history read it. This novella set in the Congo and is one of the strongest fiction about imperialism. Most literary critics have assumed that this is an anti-imperialism novella and considered the other aspects. Moreover, we have the other critics who have paid attention to Conrad’s attitude on the matter of imperialism. Keith Booker declares that the book deals with issues such as imperialism, capitalism, race, and gender that were very much at the forefront of the turn -of-the century European mind. Conrad’s ambivalent treatment of these issues is extremely representative of the way they were treated in any number of European discourses of the time (217). Moreover, Achebe states that Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as ‘the other world’, the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man’s vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality (338).By considering the statements of the other critics, it can be said that Heart of Darkness has an ambiguous style. So, the aim of this paper is to understand Conrad’s post-colonial perspectives in Heart of Darkness by using of European imperialism and colonialism over Africa for clarifying this matter that how Conrad has deconstructed binary oppositions of colonialism by changing and destructing the general ideaof the Europeans towards Africa in the 19th century.

کلیدواژه ها:

Joseph Conrad ، Heart of Darkness ، Empire ، Ambivalence