“No fear can stand up to hunger, no patience can wear it out, disgust simply does not exist where hunger is; and as to superstition, beliefs and what you may call principles, they are less than chaff in a breeze. Don’t you know the devilry of lingering starvation, its exasperating torment, its black thoughts, its somber and brooding ferocity? Well, I do. It takes a man all his inborn strength to fight hunger properly;. It’s really easier to face bereavement, dishonor, and the perdition of one’s soul-than this kind of prolonged hunger. Sad, but true. And these chaps, too, had no earthly reason for any kind of scruple. Restraint! I would just as soon have expected restraint from a hyena prowling amongst the corpses of a battlefield.”
In the quotation above, Marlow refers to the natives that make up the crew on his ship. He marvels at the fact that although they must be starving, they restrain themselves from killing and eating him and his white companions. Through examination of Marlow’s thoughts about the cannibals his views on the
This exert also maintains one of the main themes from “Heart of Darkness”; the criticism of colonization. The natives’ conditions expose the absurdity of imperialism. There are slave like conditions for the crew, who perform backbreaking labor and receive hunger in return; their only salary is wire that they cannot trade for anything worthwhile. The entire system leaves the physical strength of the organization with only emptiness. In this passage Conrad displays that while the so called civilized men devour anything they can, the natives have balanced their natural desires with human principles.
When Marlow states that he knows what this “lingering starvation” feels like, does he mean in the sense that the cannibals feel, the physical need for food or as Kurtz feels, for power?
While Marlow makes compelling observations about the natives, he never expresses any emotion toward them, is he simply self-centered or does Conrad do this to show that Africans are only seen as a background for Europeans?
For some reason I can’t create a new blog post, so I’ll just post a comment for now. What I found striking about Heart of Darkness is that Marlow lost his naivety by confronting reality. He began his journey believing the power and justification of the British Empire, and yet as he begins to see the gears of the empire turning he realizes just how wrong he was. None of the other passengers on the Nellie understand where Marlow is coming from because they don’t have the same experiences as he does. He has been on the front lines of the empire and understands just how evil and wrong it is.
ReplyDeleteThis idea is an underlying fact in humanity. When we are far from a problem, it is easy to dismiss it or write it off. When the problem comes to our doorstep and we have to deal with it, we cannot cope with what the problem forces us to do. For English people living in Britain, they have no thought or worry for what goes on in Africa. It is not their problem as long as wealth continues flowing in. The occasion headline from the far corners of the empire is not enough to engage their interest in what the empire is doing to the world. In the world today, we have the same problem. We fight two wars, have global climate problems and have a recessing economy. Yet as long as the problem isn’t directly affecting us, we don’t worry about it and we don’t take steps towards fixing it. We assume that it is someone else’s problem. If someone believed in the wonder of America, then went and saw the problems we have caused around the world, it would be easy to empathize with Marlow’s lost sense of direction and self.
Have you ever had one of your ideas or beliefs fundamentally shaken, and its integrity ruined?
Have you ever thought about the effects your lifestyle has on others?
What I like about this passage is how it opens Marlow's mind and disproves some of the prejudices he had before. The way Conrad writes this passage it seems as if he wants the audience to interpret all of the raw data that Marlow sends at them. Marlow never says "I realized something then..." Instead, he is as confused about the experience as we are. Marlow simply realizes that this event made an impact on him.
ReplyDeleteThe way that Marlow compares the natives' restraint to "a hyena prowling amongst the corpses of a battlefield" shows that he thinks of them as less than human. I don't think this is necessarily because he is self-centered. If natives are nothing above a hyena to him it probably doesn't even reach a conscious level for him to feel emotion towards them. This is just one of the many times that Marlow shows his racist tendencies towards the natives.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Rachel's comment that it's not the fact that he is self-centered but more that it never occurs to him to feel any emotion towards the Africans. I think an interesting part of the book that relates to this is when his crew member is killed in the attack and Marlow watches him die. He later states that he misses him and seems a bit confused by this. Perhaps this is again a case of Marlow not being able to describe his trauma but one would think a person would have a stronger reaction to watching a crew member die at his feet that just surprise that he later misses him. As far as the lingering starvation I felt that he was just talking about his hunger but I think that the power correlation you draw is an interesting one.
ReplyDeleteI think that the most important part of this passage is the discrepancy of respect. The restraint of the Africans reveals a certain respect for the Europeans they are traveling with, the recognition that they are human beings. In fact, it points to a level of respect quite disproportionate to the respect that they have for other Africans. They refuse to eat the Europeans, but when the group of Africans that Kurtz sends after the steamboat attacks, one of the "cannibals" tells Marlow to catch them so that they might make a meal out of them. This emphasizes the European idea of Africans viewing them as "god-like", in much the same way as the natives that follow Kurtz exemplify this myth.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, Marlow fails to recognize even the basic needs of his assistants up until this point. He views these people as gears in his machine, disposable parts.