ENG 1120 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Noble Savage
2 Feb 2018
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Document Summary
There"s a reason conrad made it a story of a story instead of just marlow living through it all rst hand. Civilized enlightenment is based on the idea of progress. Conrad"s not a romantic, he doesn"t believe in the noble savage. The people in the congo are represented as the darkness. The question is whether the people in europe are also symbols of darkness. Marlow doesn"t buy into the propaganda about civilizing the savages. Farce: a lot of the characters seem like caricatures. Actions by french military are called insane. Contrast between unreal world of european conquest and reality of nature and. Nature needs to have an idea attached to it in order to be validated, nature itself isn"t enough. Even though conrad is judgemental of european imperialism, he is also a product of it. The natives are real to marlow and do represent darkness either through racism or the dark forces of nature.
