A Comparison: Heart of Darkness and Waiting for the Barbarians

In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad discusses the nature of colonialism and imperialism and the relationship between the protagonist, Marlow, and one such imperialist, Kurtz. In Waiting for the Barbarians, J.M. Coetzee, through his first-person narrator, explores the nature of empire and the necessity of an enemy to keep Empire alive. Thus, both novels have themes of forced submission, unexplainable racism, and a dichotomy of good vs. evil that is not as clear as it may first appear.

The Africans in Heart of Darkness and the barbarians in Waiting for the Barbarians serve as contrived foils to the “superior” race in each novel: Europeans in Heart of Darkness and the Empire in Waiting for the Barbarians. As Chinua Achebe points out in his article “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness,” Joseph Conrad perpetuates the European desire and necessity to set up Africa as a complete foil to Europe. Coetzee builds on this in Waiting for the Barbarians, and he points out the obvious flaw in Conrad’s argument. He discusses the need of an enemy—even an artificial one—to keep an empire alive. The magistrate in the novel says, “One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies” (131). Thus, Coetzee recognizes what Conrad fails to: that the reason the barbarians—or the Africans in the case of Heart of Darkness—are the enemy is not because they are inferior in any way to the race of the empire, but rather that they must be the enemy to keep the empire in each case alive.

In both Heart of Darkness and Waiting for the Barbarians, there is certainly a dichotomy of good and evil. However, the magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians realizes that he is not all that different from Colonel Joll, and the distinction between Marlow and Kurtz by the end of Heart of Darkness is even less clear. When the magistrate says that he could have tied the barbarian to a chair and beat her, and it would have been just as romantic and personal, he is clearly recognizing that he really is similar to Joll, who literally does beat the barbarians. Similarly, when Marlow visits Kurtz’s Intended, he lies to her about Kurtz’s final words. Thus, as in Waiting for the Barbarians, the line between good and evil is very vague. Marlow does little to stop the racism, and though the magistrate houses a barbarian and tries to stop Colonel Joll at the end from beating them more, he is largely unsuccessful.