Abuse of Power in Heart of Darkness and in Frankenstein

Joseph Conrad the writer of “The Heart of Darkness” (1899) describes as his own narrator of thoughts, the expedition and imperialism ideology that leads him through the Congo. Conrad has just taken a short ride up river to his company’s station. He was taken up by a Swede, who warned him about fellow men hanging themselves. The environment was new to Conrad, it’s noted as he observes the hills, rocky enclosures, and the naked African-Americans walking about. The specific texts begins, as Conrad’s curiosity of his new station, leads him up a hill. The books describes the new landscape to be close to rapids, the author, who is Conrad narrating her own thoughts, makes the noise and clustered groove to add confusion and unfamiliarity.

In Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, the imperialism of Africa is described. Conrad tells the story of the cruel treatment of the natives and of the imperialism of the Congo region through the perspective of the main character, Marlow. Throughout the novel, Marlow describes how the Europeans continuously bestow poor treatment to the native people by enslaving them in their own territory. Analyzing the story with the New Criticism lens, it is evident that Conrad incorporates numerous literary devices in Heart of Darkness, including similes, imagery, personification, and antitheses to describe and exemplify the main idea of cruel imperialism in Africa discussed throughout the novella.

Joseph Conrad's novella, Heart of Darkness, describes a life-altering journey that the protagonist, Marlow, experiences in the African Congo.  The story explores the historical period of colonialism in Africa to exemplify Marlow's struggles.  Marlow, like other Europeans of his time, is brought up to believe certain things about colonialism, but his views change as he experiences colonialism first hand. This essay will explore Marlow's view of colonialism, which is shaped through his experiences and also from his relation to Kurtz.  Marlow's understanding of Kurtz's experiences show him the effects colonialism can have on a man's soul.

The cruelty that Marlow sees in the congo sways his opinion against total imperialism. He views piles of bodies on the street, murder for

It is said that a man dies twice. The first death occurs the moment when his last breath is taken, and the second occurs when his name is said for the final time. It is no secret that Victor Frankenstein had a god complex. He understood that he would eventually die, but yearned for his legacy to be carried onward, and thought creating life was the best way to secure his own eternality. Victor’s wish to create life for the monster was overshadowed by his own wish to live onward, and shrouded in false good-intentions. His power peaked quickly with the creation of the monster, and began an immediate decline with his mental state. There are many characters in this story, but they are all ancillary save for Victor and the creature, whom the power struggle revolves around almost entirely.

Joseph Conrad 's Heart of Darkness is both a dramatic tale of an arduous trek into the Belgian Congo at the turn of the twentieth century and a symbolic journey into the deepest recesses of human nature. On a literal level, through Marlow 's narration, Conrad provides a searing indictment of European colonial exploitation inflicted upon African natives. By employing several allegoric symbols this account depicts the futility of the European presence in Africa.

King Leopold from “The Black Man’s Burden” and the company from “The Heart of Darkness” have very similar motives attributed to imperialism, such as exploiting Africa of it resources. Joseph Conrad doesn’t single out to any one motive in particular he gives them all their fair share in “ The Heart of Darkness,” the point that Conrad tries to emphasize is how imperialism is associated with many negatives.

Frankenstein, one of the most notable horror novels in history has fascinated countless generations of people for many years. Its mysterious plot and eerie details have captured readers across the globe. Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein brilliantly wrote this tale and filled it with numerous themes that make readers think and question the motives of each character throughout the novel. One of the most prominent themes in this book is the desire for power. Power is something that every person yearns for at some point in their life. Most readers can relate to Mary Shelley’s novel when she discusses the power each character in her book possesses;

He wants to see Africa and explore it, so he applies to a trading company where he can operate a steam boat up. His Aunt suggests that the Company is an imperialistic one, but Marlow says, “I ventured to hint that the Company was run for profit” (77). Once he arrives to the Congo, he must quickly adapt to not only new physical conditions but also to new cultures and societies. Because of this shift, Marlow’s “id, superego, ego” becomes unbalanced.

By providing an in-depth analysis of what really occurred with Leopold and his exploitative proprietorship of the Congo “Free” State, Hochschild cogently convinces readers that beneath all of Europe’s coaxing and flattery about their imperialism, there is an underlying nature of terror and an almost inescapable and pervasive essence of death and slavery. Hochschild perfectly depicts the drama arising from the deceitful manipulations, courageous resistances, and uncut greed into an enthralling piece of literature. Not only does Hochschild use the perspectives of Europeans, but he tells the untold truths of the natives in their abysmal states, having to face inevitable horrors and atrocities. The reader experiences the magnitude of effects that resulted in this imperialism, which may still last in modern-day Africa. Hochschild’s persuasion perfectly captures what it is that he wants the readers to take in the most: that Leopold’s imperialism of the Congo did not only affect Europe and himself. Separating from the common curriculum of history class, Hochschild doesn’t want to tell the readers that imperialism led to European nations gaining more markets, population, and raw materials: he wants the reader to understand that this all came at a cost. This imperialism led to the deaths of ten million natives in the Congo alone. This imperialism led to brutal torture of the

In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the author fiercely challenges imperialism. Through this challenge, he demonstrates the internal battles of good and evil. In his work, he also displays issues of personal morals and alienation. At the time the novella was written, Europe had established territories across the map. It holds true that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, especially when said power reigns over the fate of humans in society. Conrad illustrates the corruption of power through the books’ motif of darkness and the renegade of Kurtz.

Imperialism and its oppressive processes have affected societies as well as individual lives for centuries. In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, oppression through imperialism demonstrates how a certain civilization, the Congolese, is affected negatively by imperialism. By focusing on Africa, it allows for a graphic recount of the many years spent reigned by foreign oppressors and tyrannies. In Heart of Darkness, the Congo is oppressed by the imperialists economically and geographically. As well, the oppressed people are taken advantage of spiritually. Conrad describes how the ruling tyrant is affected by the process of conquering a local people and this draws a parallel to the ruling empire. Conrad, through his novel, attempts to

Joseph Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness because he wanted to expose human temptation to experiment with darkness when one’s own desires overcome one’s morals. By writing from his own experience of exploring the Congo, Conrad draws conclusions that no one is immune to the dark desires that lie in the depths of one’s own heart. While living in a place with no moral restraint, Conrad saw how people’s minds changed giving them the freedom to explore the darkness, greed in particular, of their desires with no regards for morality.

In “An Image of Africa”, Chinua Achebe comes to the bold conclusion that Joseph Conrad “was a bloody racist” (788), with his discussion centering primarily on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as a racist text. Achebe’s reasoning for this branding rests on the claims that Conrad depicts Africa as “a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar in comparison with which Europe 's own state of spiritual grace will be manifest” (783), that Africans in Heart of Darkness are dehumanized through both the characterization of individual Africans and the Congo as a setting, and finally that Marlow is no more than a mouthpiece for Conrad’s personal views on race and imperialism. However, Achebe makes critical oversights and contradictions in the development of each of these argumentative pillars, which prove fatal to the validity of his overarching contention. This should not be construed, though, as a yes-or-no assessment of whether Conrad was a racist outside of what his written work suggests—Achebe himself has “neither the desire nor, indeed, the competence to do so with the tools of the social and biological sciences” (783)—but as an assessment of claims specific to Heart of Darkness and their implications for Conrad’s views and attitudes.

In Heart of Darkness, the reader is given the a first person account of the horrors of imperialism bolstered by Conrad’s own experience travelling up the Congo River. Patrick Brantlinger, a professor from Indiana University, defends Conrad noting that, “much of the ‘horror’ either depicted or suggested in Heart of Darkness… exposed Leopold 's bloody system between the time of his return to England and the composition of the novella in 1898-99.” Even Achebe at concedes in his essay, “An Image of