A critical analysis of Heart of darkness and Things fall apart: successful or unsuccessful counter-discourse of Conrad’s novella?

Abstract

This paper aims to conduct a critical analysis of Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart and English author Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness to study whether Achebe’s postcolonial novel works as a successful counter-discourse of Conrad’s controversial book. This paper also aims to analyze whether Conrad was actually critical against colonialism or did he inherit racist traits more despite being a writer of the modernist period. We can witness the portrayal of Africans, and their condition of life in these two novels. Joseph Conrad has written his novel from the perspective of a European spectator. Chinua Achebe has written the novel from the perspective of an African native. Certainly, their ways of seeing Africa are not alike. In the essay named “An Image of Africa”, Achebe states Conrad as a racist person and discusses how he misrepresents Africa. Conrad depicts Africa as wild, uncivilized, and dark. Achebe has pointed out Conrad’s image of Africa as distorted and one-sided. Achebe in his novel shows African history, education, religion, society, and many other aspects which are unknown to the west. This paper followed the textual analysis of qualitative data reflected in these novels. The research is important because it will help us understand the orientalist approach of the West—the unequal power relation of the Oriental and the Occidental, and hegemony created by the West through their literary works. These issues have been analyzed with the help of prominent post-colonial theories and books like Edward W. Said’s Orientalism and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth.