Comparison Of Light And Darkness In Joseph Conrad's The Heart Of Darkness

In Joseph Conrad’s novella, The Heart of Darkness, Conrad uses doubling patterns of opposition such as light and darkness, or white and black, to display and further emphasize the deceptive nature of man within the story. However, Conrad unexpectedly creates an inversion of the traditional definitions of light and dark, creating a work that establishes a theme where not everything is as it seems. Conrad uses physical locations to show the contrast between the two. Through the actual characters of the story, almost every white man, with the exception of Marlow, is portrayed negatively through such imagery. C Through his inversion of the definitions of light and dark, Conrad effectively goes to show that the white men can, at times, be more savage than the natives.

Conrad portrays the light of a corrupt civilization entering the dark, uncivilized native land of the Congo. With the absence of white man’s civilization, a civilization marked by corruption and evil, the black jungle of the Congo represents darkness, as defined as the absence of light. When Marlow speaks of and describes the Belgian city of Brussels, he uses light imagery to convey a deeper meaning, “In a very few hours I arrived at a city that always makes me think of a whited sepulcher.” (Conrad 13) Conrad’s use of a whited sepulcher, or a hollow tomb, in defining the building that Marlow departs from is significant because the offices in that building are fueled by greed and send men to their almost certain deaths in the pursuit of wealth. The use of the white sepulcher implies death and confinement within the colonizer’s superficial idea of civilization and it highlights the hypocrisy of their intentions. The white men in the white company send unsuspecting sailors...

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...rruption, and the black natives represent purity.

Joseph Conrad goes to great lengths to stress the importance of appearance being deceptive, and he does so through careful use of contrasting light and dark imagery. He takes the common symbols of light and dark and completely reverses them. The white city of Brussels, that sends white men after the white ivory, comes into conflict with the dark Congo jungle, home to the black natives. The cruelty of the white man to the innocent natives shows Conrad’s use of light and dark imagery to emphasize the deception of character appearances. Throughout the novella, the light is viewed as more menacing and evil than the darkness, and the white characters more corrupt than the black. In the end, Conrad’s story is about the penetration of a corrupt light into darkness, and the consequences that ensue when darkness is tainted.