Conrad’s Congo Journey :: Biography Biographies Essays

Conrads congo Journey Joseph Conrads own experiences during his set off through the Congo helpered him provide a foundation for the writing of shopping center of Darkness. In 1890, Conrad took a job as a captain on the river steamer Kinshasa. Before Conrad took this job, he had worked for the French merchant navy as a way to escape Russian military service and likewise to escape the emotional troubles that had plagued him. Conrad had been in a financial crisis that was resolved with help from his uncle. After this series of events, Conrad joined the British merchant navy at the beckoning of his uncle and took the job as the captain of a steamboat in the Congo River. An any important(p) fact to remember is that Conrad was a young and inexperienced man when he was exposed to the harsh and dangerous life of a sailor. His experiences in the tungsten Indies and especially in the Belgium Congo were eye opening and facilitated his strong outlooks that are reflected in th e book Heart of Darkness. Conrads journey through the Belgian Congo gave him the experiences and knowledge to write about a place that approximately Europeans would never see in their lives. The diaries Conrad kept during his journey through the Congo gives detailed descriptions of the monotonous African landscape. Conrad wrote that the landscape of the African coast looked the corresponding every single day.1 This is reflected in Marlows narration of the jungle where shapes and forms cannot be made out clearly. The monotonous landscape differed from what Conrad had expected of this exotic location. When he was still a young kid, he had once boasted that he would someday journey to the heart of Africa. However, the actual journey was not at all what he expected it to be. Conrad was shocked at the men in the African colony. He was repulsed by the European colonizers because of the horrible treatment of the natives as good as the unlawful aggressive pursuit of loot. Con rad witnessed atrocities committed by the European colonizers, which helped to form his opinions on the colonization of Africa. In the novel, Conrad uses sarcasm to display his fretfulness towards the European colonizers treatment of the natives. The Europeans in the book are called pilgrims and the natives are called cannibals, tho the pilgrims are the ones who are much more willing to use wildness to resolve their problems.