N-Word BOOK SUMMARY

Heart of Darkness BY Conrad, Joseph

The word appears 10 times.

This book about the darkness of colonial rule in Africa shows man at his worst. The white people see the blacks as nothing but a disposable resource to be plundered, used and then disposed of when no longer profitable. They are not even human. And this is long after the slave trade has been abandoned. You can take the man out of the darkness, but you can''t take the darkness out of the man.



... so he went ashore and started to hammer the chief of the village with a stick. Oh, it didn''t surprise me in the least to hear this, and at the same time to be told that Fresleven was the gentlest, quietest creature that ever walked on two legs. No doubt he was; but he had been a couple of years already out there engaged in the noble cause, you know, and he probably felt the need to at last of asserting his self-respect in some way. Therefor he whacked the old nigger mercilessly, while a big crowd of his people watched him, thunderstruck, till some man - I was told the chief''s son - in desperation at hearing the old chap yell, made a tentative jab with a spear at the white man - and of course it went quite easy between the shoulder-blades.


"Everything else in the station was in a muddle - heads, things, buildings. Strings of dusty niggers with splay feet arrived and departed; a stream of manufactured goods, rubbishy cottons, beads, and brass-wire set into the depths of darkness, and in return cam a precious trickle of ivory.


"The population had cleared out a long time ago. Will, if a lot of mysterious niggers armed with all kinds of fearful weapons suddenly too to traveling on the road between Dean and Gravesend, catching yokels right and left to carry heavy loads for them, I fancy every farm and cottage thereabouts would be empty very soon."


The shed was already a heap of embers glowing fiercely. A nigger was being beaten near by. They said he had caused the fire in some way; be that as it may, he was screeching most horribly. I saw him, later, for several days, sitting in a bit of shade looking very sick and trying to recover himself, afterwards he arose and went out - and the wilderness without a sound hook him into its bosom again.


Black figures strolled about listlessly, pouring water on the glow, whence proceeded a sound of hissing steam ascended in the moonlight, the beaten nigger groaned somewhere. ''What a row the brute makes!'' said the indefatigable man with the mustache appearing near us. ''Serve him right. Transgression - punishment - bang! Pitiless, pitiless. That''s the only way.


...(speaking of the jungle)...the silence of the land went home to one''s very heart - its mystery, its greatness, the amazing reality of the concealed live. The hurt nigger moaned feebly somewhere near by, and then fetched a deep sigh that made me mend my pace away from there.


A quarrelsome band of footsore sulky niggers trod on the heels of the donkey; a lot of tents, camp stools, tin boxes, white cases, brown bales would be shot down in the courtyard, and the air of mystery would deepen a little over the muddle of the station.


I glanced over my shoulder, and the pilot-house was yet full of noise and smoke when I made a dash at the wheel. The fool-nigger had dropped everything, to throw the shutter open and let off that Martini-Henry. He stood before the wide opening, glaring and I yelled at him to come back, while I straightened the sudden twist out of that steamboat.


It appears these niggers do bury the tusks sometimes - but evidently they couldn''t bury this parcel deep enough to save the gifted Mr. Kurtz from his fate.


.. but in this, that I had to deal with a being to whom I could not appeal in the name of anything high or low. I had, even like the niggers, to invoke him - himself - his own exalted and incredible degradation. There was nothing either above or below him, and I knew it.