What Is The Dehumanization In Heart Of Darkness

A journey into temptation can cause a major change in someone's morality and sanity. Individuals who do not make it back from that temptation into the tame nature of society, are driven past sanity and into a “dark” mindset. However, not all of those that make it back from that temptation remain completely sane. Those individuals can be considered tainted with an underlying level of insanity, even though they made it back portraying a surface level of sanity. In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad uses color imagery, symbolism, and dehumanization of the characters in order to display an underlying parallel between Marlow’s journey into the Congo and the level of sanity/humanity left in humanity after it is faced with temptation and darkness.

Nevertheless, there is also an underlying negativity in the positive and positiveness in the negative force, portrayed by the white in the black and the black in the white. Similarly, Conrad uses a color reversal to portray all things white or light as evil, or as marked with insanity, and all things dark as good, or marked with sanity. Marlow, a man who becomes a part of an ivory trading company begins his journey by going to Brussels, Belgium for an interview. Upon arriving in the city he described it as more of a “whited sepulchre” (Conrad 73), which brings about the connotation that the company is a tomb for the morality and sanity of it’s workers, because it sends moral and sane men into an environment filled with temptation and a lack of moral enforcement. Conrad also establishes a sense of confusion when the steamboat is surrounded by a white fog that was “more blinding than the night” (Conrad 133). In addition to generating confusion, “the white fog obscures sight” (Peters 373), and provides a depiction of how the sanity, morality, and awareness of reality can be concealed for the Europeans by temptation. The white fog also serves as a way to demonstrate how it is that the workers on that steamboat where being cut off “from the outside world” (Peters 375), as they make their way deeper and deeper into the

In the beginning of the novel, the reader is introduced to Marlow while he is on a boat floating on the flooded waters, but the Thames River is described as being responsible for “the flood” (Conrad 65). Likewise, the flooding of the river can be viewed as symbolism for the flooding of Marlow’s conscience with thoughts and regrets after his journey into the darkness. Marlow begins to reflect on his actions and on the reason behind why he lied to Kurtz’s Intended. While the men around him listen to him telling the story, it seems that Marlow recounts the story more for himself, in order for him to reassure himself of his sanity in not telling the Intended the truth. Had Marlow told the truth he feels that he would have tainted her with darkness, and it would be “too dark-too dark althoughter” (Conrad 164), thus he chooses to keep the burden for himself, in an attempt to preserve whatever sanity she has left. Additionally, The Congo River is the symbol for the path to and from the darkness, or the insanity that people like Kurtz were driven to. Although Marlow is able to survive the trip and makes it back, he is only sane on the surface. Kurtz on the other hand, was stationed inside of the darkness, surrounded by temptation and corrupted, for far longer than Marlow. His large ambition for ivory transformed him from a