Heart of Darkness Essay Pg.51-75 by: Sam

462 Words2 Pages
After reading this next section of Heart Of Darkness I learned some new things about Marlow and his outlook on the natives. It started to make me wonder, what is the act of being human and civilized? The first sign of a lack of civilization is in the beginning of chapter eleven. This is when the nephew and uncle are conversing about the people they dislike including Kurtz and his unnamed assistant. The men say “..get him hanged! Why not? Anything-anything can be done in this country (pg. 53)”. This implies that there is a lack of law and morals. This made me recognize the fact that these two men are considered to be civil more so than the natives. But what makes them less of savages if this is the behavior they display? Is it because they keep these uncivilized notions hidden? Maybe that’s just it. Marlow starts to have these same ideas as he acknowledges the fact that the native men can do any job an “incompetent European” could do. But he is also beginning to see that they should be considered human. “Yes I looked at them as you would any human being, with the curiosity of their impulses, motives, capacities, weaknesses, when brought to the test of an inexorable physical necessity (pg.69)”. Even more, Marlow starts to understand that the Europeans and the natives are really not that different; they both have that underlying uncivilized version of themselves. The Natives just choose to express this side of them while Marlow and the other Europeans attempt to hide it away. “No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it-this suspicion of their not being inhuman. They howled and leaped and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity-like yours-the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar (pg.59)”. This idea of one person being better than another because of
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