The Silence of Nature in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: An Ecocritical Study

Nature’s passivity in modern man’s discourse has been the area of focus in Ecocriticism. Ecocritics do believe that Nature has lost its vibrancy and vitality in the realm of modern man’s exclusively anthropocentric culture. Such ‘otherization’ of Nature has its roots in the Western philosophical and discursive practices. The Enlightenment philosophy has been instrumental in taking the dehumanization of Nature to a new low in the sense that it sees Nature as an inert, dull and dispirited entity that has its existence only for the material benefit of man. This kind of an attitude is clearly seen in the way the colonizing people in Conrad’s fiction dehumanize Nature and delineate it as a dull and lifeless entity. Based on these precepts this article intends to reread Conrad’s fiction from an ecocritical perspective and thus desires to expose the mechanism through which the human assumes for itself a central position in the universal scheme of things and relegates Nature to the realms o silence and instrumentality.