Chinua Achebe Essay Response

Chinua Achebe proclaims that Joseph Conrad was a racist and that he showed this in his novel Heart of Darkness. Achebe even comes right out and says “Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist”. One thing that caught my attention that Achebe said was about how “Conrad chose his subject well—one which was guaranteed not to put him in conflict with psychological predisposition of his readers or raise the need for him to contend with their resistance. He chose the role of purveyor of comforting myths.” What Achebe is trying to say is that Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness with a racist attitude because that is what readers have learned as they grew up. When a reader reads something that they know to be true, it boosts their confidence and makes them engage into the book better and then a connection grows between the reader and the book. Achebe believes that Joseph Conrad was racist in his novel to lure readers into his book. I do not agree that Joseph Conrad was racist in his novel, Heart of Darkness. Even reading Heart of Darkness I didn’t stop and think that Conrad was racist because of what he wrote. I think that this is just one story that can be told. I believe that what was thought and said in Heart of Darkness of the native people was true to what some white settlers really thought. I didn’t while reading the novel think that the author himself was racist, but some of the characters in the novel were. There were some parts in there where I just had to stop reading and was like wow did that really just happen? I thought that Conrad was trying to show what had happened to convince people that it was very wrong by showing how bad it was, all the thoughts and feelings the white settlers had for the natives. As an author or anyone really, people are going to try to take what you say and twist it. Not everyone is going to agree with you, and Achebe obviously does not agree with Conrad. Achebe may see Conrad’s novel as racist because of who he is. If Achebe was from the same background as Conrad, would he still see the novel as racist? I don’t think he would, only because you have to see both sides of the story and Conrad was telling one side of the story, and it was the way that white settlers had thought of and treated the natives of Africa.