Heart of Darkness #1: The Portrayal of the Natives

            In the first eleven pages of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the reader is introduced to Charlie Marlow, the man telling the story about his experience in Africa.  In this first section of the book, Marlow is only at the outer station.  Here he first comes into contact with the African natives.  The way Marlow portrays the natives he encounters on the hill shows how the Caucasian males did not think of the black natives as humans but instead as uncivilized savages.  When Marlow was walking along the hill, he describes the natives he saw as “’Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced with the dim light” (71/83).  Describing the natives as shapes takes away any sense of humanity given to the men and “clinging to the earth” gives the image of someone suffering and begging for help due to the fact that clinging has a hopeless connotation.  Also, saying the men are “effaced with the dim light” gives the idea that the natives hide from the sun, making them less relatable and seemingly less human.  When Marlow is still on the hill, “’While [he] stood horror-struck, one of these creatures rose to his hands and knees, and went off on all-fours towards the river to drink’” (72/84).   The image created by this sentence is one of an animal crawling to drink water.  The image one has when they think of a human drinking water is typically one of an affluent white male standing on his two legs drinking water out of a glass.  This observation of the black man crawling to the river starkly contrasts this image the reader has and shows just how different the black men were from the white European males and how the natives were looked upon as uncivilized savages.  Marlow’s descriptive imagery and wisely chosen diction gives the reader insight into the view of the native Africans as uncivilized savages.

**In the parenthetical citations, the number before the slash equates to the page number in the Signet Classics 2008 version and the number after the slash equates to the page number in the Signet Classics 1997 version.