Cruelty



Cruelty


 * Chains represent cruelty in the way they are used in Joseph Conrad's book, The Heart of Darkness. In the book, Marlow sees 6 black slaves all chained to each other carrying earth, or dirt, and all stripped to the bone. The chains show cruelty and how the slaves were treated. Conrad conceptualizes this type of theme throughout the book, always showing dark stuff with the color black, such as the slaves being renamed as dark shades and not even labeled as a person anymore.


 * Later on in the book, Marlow is on his steamer with his crew to look for a certain man named Kurtz. He is stopped by a russian man who tells them that them being attacked was a joke of some sort and that they shouldn't be worried, even though one of the crew members died in the attack. The russian man is one of Kurtz' followers and leads Marlow and the manager to a ruined house on a hill which is Kurtz' place. Marlow sees that all around the perimeter of Kurtz' house are poles with heads on them, which Conrad uses to show cruelty and to show what type of man Kurtz' really is, which is not this glorified man they put him out to be, but rather, a cruel thief who is crazed by ivory and shows territorial dominance to those around him, taking all the ivory within his area, which, also, is an imperialistic view of things.

 Works Cited

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness . June 2006 ed. Clayton, Delaware: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1918. 19, 51, 55, 56. Print.