Interesting Parallels

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians contain, at the center of their thematic material, an essentially very similar message. That message is one of a solitary man who departs from what his culture or society views as right. Both Kurtz in Heart of Darkness and Magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians “regress” into “less civilized” patterns of behavior that are looked-down upon by the establishment, and both are punished for it. They sympathize with the native populations—the Africans for Kurtz and the barbarians for the Magistrate—and are seen as “going native” and rejecting the positive aspects of their respective society’s.
Both the magistrate and Kurtz are relatively important members of their cultures. They do not represent an opposition to their “empires,” but rather are integrally a part of them. The Magistrate realizes this, when he says on page 135 of Coetzee’s novel, “I was the lie that Empire tells itself when times are easy…” Whether or not the actions of the magistrate and Kurtz are viewed as a betrayal of their cultures or not is subjective, but what is certain is that they, according to John W. Griffith, chose “the path of assimilation” into the native population that they live among and their actions are “synonymous with degeneracy and demoralization.”
An easily quantifiable quality that the main characters of the both of these novels pick up as they “assimilate” (or “go native” or however you want to call it) is the having of a native woman as a mistress. Kurtz has one, the magistrate has one. These women act as a human, feminine connection between these exploratory and investigative men and the native, local cultures in which they have such an interest.
The most interesting connection between the Magistrate and Kurtz is their importance to their respective empires even after their regression. It doesn’t particularly matter that Kurtz has gone mad way upriver as long as he continues to send down ivory. And when the magistrate’s relatively harmless interest in the barbarians is replaced with Colonel Joll’s repression. In both novels, everything was going essentially just fine—well, not so much for Kurtz by our standards, but he was doing okay by his—until someone comes along and interferes with what the “regressed” men we’re going about their business on.
Even though Waiting for the Barbarians and Heart of Darkness were written by different authors in different places in different centuries, many of the thematic issues that the novels bring up overlap and parallel each other. Perhaps this is because the presence of colonials and their contact with the native population is an issue that has been dealt with worldwide for hundreds of years.