Heart Of Darkness Literary Analysis

The Natural Environment In Literary Texts from Three Continents Interaction with the natural environment is an inevitable part of being human. Regardless of where one is born or raised, the natural environment is present to some degree. Furthermore, narratives and impressions around this natural environment become formed and imprinted on individuals through cultures and societies. These narratives can differ significantly, however, based on context and cultural implications. Within Heart of Darkness, “Abiku”, and “The Silent Traders”, the natural environment plays distinctly different roles. In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the natural environment is consistently shown to be oppressive. Nature is not a force that is comforting or transcendent.

The coast is “featureless”, with “monotonous grimness”, a jungle that is almost “black”, and a “fierce” sun. Just a few lines later, this same location is described as a “God-forsaken wilderness”, and the names of the places that the narrator passes are “names that seemed to belong to some sordid farce acted in front of a sinister back-cloth” (39). This sense of oppression sets the stage for the madness and degradation that the narrator witnesses in Kurtz. The sense that Conrad creates is of the natural world as an huge force that has the power to crush the human body and spirit: “And outside, the silent wilderness surrounding this cleared speck on the earth struck me as something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion” (26). At the same time, Conrad uses the wildness of nature in Africa to mirror the darkness of humankind’s nature and colonialism in the nineteenth century: “At the risk of simplification, the story may be seen as an allegory, the journey ending with the sombre realization of the darkness of man’s heart” (Sarvan 8). For Conrad, the threat posed by nature is a parallel to the threat posed by human callousness and a lust for power. The constant sense of darkness portrayed through Conrad’s descriptions of nature and the “black” jungle are mirrored in the interactions that he has with his fellow

In “The Silent Traders”, people engage in a constant system of bartering between civilization and the wildness of nature. This interaction is clear when the narrator’s children attempt to catch the wild kittens, only to become entrapped in the thicket: “When they rejoined me, they had dead leaves and twigs snagged all over them” (Tsushima 2). The narrator also writes: “[…] the name ‘Rikugien’ brought to mind not the tidy, sunlit lawns seen by visitors, but the dark tangles along the walls” (2). Nature is the place where unwanted things are deposited. The overly-sociable dog is dropped over the wall into the wood and is never seen again. There is something mysterious and even magical about the wood; things disappear there, and the wood evokes a question of “transformation” that may occur at night (4). The narrator seems to imply that something is going on in the wood that defies understanding and has an element of the mystical to it. This may even include her own children and their relationship with the cats that live in the wood, which may serve as a surrogate “father” to the children. In this text, the characters exist in an uneasy symbiosis with the natural world: “Fear and respect for the unknown in nature have the power to create folklore, and the characters