In “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness,” Chinua Achebe states that “it is the desire—one might indeed say the necessity—in Western psychology to set Africa up as an obstacle to Europe” (337). Indeed, it is wise for Achebe to make this statement while discussing Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a short novel that presents the relationship between Europe and Africa as an entirely one-sided narrative that denies the African people their right to be characters. For most of the novel, Marlow's telling of a story goes so far beyond telling a narrative that it functions to prevent the African people from developing a voice of their own. Edward Said, in Culture and Imperialism, provides perhaps the most powerful explanation of how the narrative told by Marlow in the novel works against the African people: As one critic has suggested, nations themselves are narratives. The power to narrate, or to prevent other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism and constitutes one of the main links between them. (xiii)Marlow possesses the power to narrate, and therefore the power to prevent the African people from possessing their own voice. Achebe is right that Marlow's depiction of Africa “projects the image of Africa as 'the other world,' the antithesis of Europe and therefore civilization” (338). However, in addition to preventing a narrative from occurring through the telling of his own, Marlow performs a narrative that aims to create a separation between “us,” the Europeans, and “them,” the Africans (xiii). His narrative, for the benefit of European identity, denies the African people any voice in matters between the two continents. Thus, Marl...... middle of paper ......tz was aligned with his confrontation with the darkness, the same ferocity that ultimately consumes him, finds its sole voice in his final words: "The horror! How horrible!", but regardless, Marlow cannot allow them to become part of the final narrative. He knows he must not allow the voice of a savage, who Kurtz has become by being so engulfed in the darkness, to have a voice in his narrative. Once again, the narrative denies Africans, even through the voice of a European, to have a voice in a narrative that takes place primarily in their territory. Marlow, as a man of Europe, seems to make the decision whether say the last words to Kurtz or not, but he knows he couldn't since they would be a voice from the Congo In conclusion, Marlow's narrative is the narrative of the European city exploiting the African colony.