Member-only story
Beasts In The Darkness
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a novella published in 1899 about a European man’s journey into Africa and how his experience of the continent radically changes him. Beasts of No Nation is a modern film adaptation of a novel about a young African child’s experience of violence within his country, and how he is forced to adapt to traumatic and dangerous circumstances. Though Beasts of No Nation is set in the present, it shares a striking amount of similarities to Heart of Darkness. Conrad’s novella laid the framework for thematic and literary portrayals of Africa; the modes through which he engaged with the continent and its people are utilized throughout Beasts of No Nation. By looking critically into these shared similarities one can see the range of Conrad’s ideas about Africa across the centuries, and observe the ways those ideas have evolved and transmuted over time.
Heart of Darkness begins with European sailors approaching port in some unknown part of the continent, which we know to be the Congo. As they approach land Conrad’s narrator, Marlow, begins to wax poetic about the first white men to enter Africa and how must have seemed to them:
“Yes; but it is like a running blaze onset a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds… Imagine him here — the very end of the world… a sky the color of smoke… lost in a wilderness, like a needle in a bundle of hay — cold, fog…
