Africa Under Western Eyes: The Colonial Gaze and the Narrativization of Otherness in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

Abstract

This paper offers a postcolonial reflection on the role of the gaze, in relation to narration, in the process of representing and narrativizing the Self/Other dialectic in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The central argument is that the European gaze, as articulated through Marlow’s narrative and focalization, is deeply embedded in the West’s will to power and its desire to render the colonial Other visible, knowable, and, consequently, governable. More importantly, I argue that Marlow’s gaze does not merely observe the African Other but also participates in constructing his identity, restricts his agency, and determines the conditions under which he can become visible and intelligible within the narrative. In this sense, the gaze functions as a narrative technology through which knowledge, visibility, voice, spatiality, and agency are unequally distributed between the European Self and the African Other. Nonetheless, this framework does not seek to reduce Conrad’s novella to a simple or totalizing colonial discourse. Rather, it seeks to lay bare the mechanisms through which colonial power is reproduced within the narrative while remaining attentive to the instability and ambivalence of Marlow’s position as narrator and focalizer.