Heart Of Darkness: Color, Feelings, Color, Food, Color, Good, Color, Bad

Colors characterize feelings. They have reached the point where a color can describe the feeling of something. Picasso exemplifies the implementation of color to describe feelings. A painting done with different dark tones of blue shows sadness and desperation. Color is also used in real life to make people feel certain things. Fast food companies almost always use red, yellow, and orange in their logos as well as inside the restaurant because they want their customers to feel the need of their food, fast. Anxiety, hunger, and adrenaline are produced by these colors making you order more, in larger proportions than you normally do, and eat this faster than what would normally take to eat that amount of food.

Joseph Conrad, in his novel Heart Of Darkness, wants the reader to experience the journey as real as possible. Through the meticulous attention to the tones of darkness and light in his work he shows the reader the differences between these two colors. According to Conrad: "It was as though an animated image of death carved out of old ivory had been shaking its hand with menaces at a motionless crowd of men made of dark" (pg. 111). The word "ivory" refers to the tusks of the elephants which were cut off for jewelry. This white and precious material describes Kurtz. Made out of "ivory" he is a good person since he is made out of pure white. The "crowd of men made of dark" show the darkness of the scene. These men are dark and have negative intention by attacking Kurtz. Conrad uses the difference between black and white to separate what is good from what is bad. Generally he uses the white imagery to describe the colonizers and the dark imagery to describe the natives.

Conrad uses this black and white imagery throughout the novel. At one point he presents us a gray one. According to Conrad: "I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness" (pg, 131). The nothingness expressed in this sentences expands further with the color gray. Gray is not black nor white, since it is not good nor bad it is nothing. Conrad portrays to the reader that when facing death nothingness is the feeling that domains. If he loses, nothing will happen. If he wins, the same outcome will happen. Through this use of death and gray imagery he portrays the "greyness" of life. The reader feels this uncertainness of whether things are good or bad, black or white.