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Friday, November 9, 2012

The Journey: Civilization of the Darkest Part of Africa

For Conrad, the individual possesses within himself the supposition of the primitive, scarcely society and civilization have created a example of control by which the individual can escape from that state. This seems intelligible in the opening passages as Marlow is about to tell his flooring to the early(a) men sitting on the deck and refers to the civilizing regularise of Western culture from Roman times to the pre move. The England of two molarity years ago, the England to which the Romans came, is compared to the Africa to which Marlow has traveled, and this connection indicates the primitive nature of Africa, fixateting it up as a pre-civilized place. For Marlow, society is aroundthing the individual should b polish off to in order to maintain the social order:

The conquest of the earth, which broadly means the taking it away from those who have a unlike complexion of slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a somewhat thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the view only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretense however an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea--something you can set up, and bow d sustain before, and offer a sacrifice to . . . (Conrad 10).

The compound history of Belgium and the Belgian Congo shows precisely this "idea only."

Clearly, thither is a racist component in the "idea only," for that idea is that Europeans have a right to ext


Zaire: A Country Study. U.S. State Department, 1993: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/zrtoc.html.

. . . the audience represents a spectrum of social types and values; implicit in their appreciation of Marlow is an admission that his point of view somehow transcends their own partial ones (Palmer 9).

end their domain at the expense of others. Marlow has some regret at the fact that this is so, but in the end in that respect is nothing he can do but accept it.
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Marlow is ever the moralist, and his place in the novel is ace in understanding to that of his audience on the deck:

David Livingstone was a Scottish missionary who explored the Congo between 1840 and 1872 and brought the region to the tutelage of the world when Henry Morton Stanley, a journalist, was commissioned by the naked York Herald to conduct a search for him. After this, Belgium's major power LJopold II turned his ambitions to the area. At the time, the Congo River basin remained for the just about part unknown to Europeans. LJopold II founded the International Association of the Congo, financed by an international consortium of bankers. The north bank of the river had been claimed by France, preeminent ultimately to the creation of the colony of French Congo. LJopold II sent Stanley to explore the territory, and he sailed up the Congo to Stanleyville (now Kisangani), signing much than 450 treaties on behalf of LJopold II with persons described as local chieftains who had concur to cede their rights of sovereignty over much of the Congo washbowl (Zaire: A Country Study).

What is apparent in the novel is that there is everlastingly an ambiguity in Marlow as in other Europeans, for they are drawn to different parts of the world and withal always believe that their own society is the best. This realization forces them always to see other peoples in the world as lesser beings, even as they may tolerate them. Marlow notes how he and the other man on the yacht are binded, but the link is not British civilization but t
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