Shedding Light on Conrads Darkness :: Essays Papers

shedding Light on Conrads DarknessMy mother bore me in the s bring outherly wild, And I am black, but O my soul is white etiolate as an angel is the English child But I am black as if bereavd of light. -William Blake The Little Black Boy. Bereavd of light is the quintessential idea one encounters when reading Conrads Heart of Darkness. We enter the Congo, a fructify filled with Keats verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways, a place where Conrad calls the farthest peak of navigation. From whence comes our source of light? Who is this source of light? In recite to enhance our understanding I propose that we matter into the one who is out of place. To clarify my proposal, I mean to say that we will look at the Black man in the White setting, and immorality versa. In Book VII of his famous poem, The Prelude, William Wordsworth tells of his encounter with The mendicant on the streets of London. In my opinion, the Beggar is representative of the Black man in London. He is seen as a beggar, treated exchangeable one, and respected, or rather, disrespected, like one. He is innocently a spectacle, a nuisance, living off the mere scraps of the English. Wordsworth describes the beggar saying, ...a blind Beggar, who, with his upright face, stood, propped against a wall, upon his chest tiring a written paper, to explain the story of the man and who he was. My caput did at this spectacle turn round as with the might of waters, and it seemed to me that in this tag was a type, or emblem, of the utmost that we know, both of ourselves and of the universe and on the convention of the unmoving man, his fixed face and sightless eyes, I looked, as if admonished from other world. We find the Beggar out of place, in a world intelligibly non his own. He is labeled, shunned, outcasted. He lies blind, desolate, unmoving. This is what the English society has done to him. same the African natives in Heart of Darkness he is silenced, yet he screams a powerful image. His labe l says it all. Wordsworth, the Englishman, is unable to reach out to him, as he is from another world. Yet he cannot help but be caught, trapped, by the spectacle of the Beggar. His message cannot be overlooked, just as Conrads message is not to be overlooked either.