Heart Of Darkness And Things Fall Apart Analysis

Things Fall Apart and Heart of Darkness

Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe, and Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad are two books who share the same central subject, that is to say, the colonization of Africa. Even though, in both stories we get to read about how europeans arrive to a new continent, and their ways of treating the native people, there are some differences in the way the novels portray the stories.

In Heart of Darkness, we get to read about Marlow, a european man who is fascinated by maps and travels to Congo, Africa, in search of new adventures and discoveries. As Marlow travels through Congo, he learns to know about a man named Kurtz, an agent who works for a Dutch Ivory trading company, and who is considered an extraordinary

He is described as a hardworking, strict and serious man who fears to become anything like his father, Unoka - who is described as a lazy and a coward, yet a gentle person ("And so Okonkwo was ruled by one passion - to hate everything that his father Unoka had loved. One of those things was gentleness and another was idleness.", Achebe, page 10). Okonkwo is also described as hot tempered man, as his three wives and eight children fears his temper. When Okonkwo commits the crime of accidentally killing a boy (he had already committed the crime of beating one his wives on Week of Peace), he is exiled from his tribe for seven years. He and his family then leave to his motherland, Mbanta. While in Mbanta, he finds out about the arrival of the white

Here they have names, personalities and families. They are not described as just ”savages”. We also get the feeling that the Igbo people are actually civilized. In fact, they have their own culture, laws, traditions and beliefs. Even the usage of animal imagery is something that differs quite a lot between these two novels. While in Conrad’s work, it is used in a more negative sense, in Achebe’s it is used to tell