Living Dead

Heart of Darkness, written by Joseph Conrad, snatched my attention when Marlow began to recount his travels in Africa working for a trading company. I found a certain resemblance between the dehumanizing colonizing society Marlow encountered in his early days and the cataclysmic society presented in the t.v show, The Walking Dead. While The Walking Dead sees a group of survivors in a zombie apocalypse try to survive and reestablish society, but loosing social order and society's values, Marlow presents the decay of society in the colonization of Africa.

When Marlow arrived at the Company's station he encountered black natives in their final attempts to survive European order. These men were imposed a new social order and organization that ultimately failed, and it transformed them into nothingness. "They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now,--nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom." (page 28): Marlow's description of these lifeless people reminded me of the zombies in The Walking Dead. Once a person dies, they eventually become a lifeless wanderer full of disease and nothingness. These soulless corpses eventually take the few survivors to the edge, making them loose their minds. They kill their relatives, become greedy, commit suicide and in the end, they will all end up like the zombies. For now what Marlow saw in Africa is uncertain, but the way Europeans stripped Africans from civilization is similar to the way Rick or Shane dehumanize and try to kill each other when they should have tried to survive together. The natives and the zombies have no opportunity to regain humanity, but colonizers and survivors do. Yet both survivors in The Walking Dead and European colonizers lost civilized and controlled ways. 

Regardless of what made Colonizers savages, or the pressure zombies put on survivors in The Walking Dead, they all end up decaying in the bits of society they have left. Marlow says these men have almost no human life left in them, the same as the zombies Rick fights against, but in the end these inhuman creatures can overrun humane people. The restrains civilized people oppose on uncivilized people take them to the brink of humanity and the preassure of survival or imperial growth imposed on themselves, pushes them over. They take the leap and dehumanize just like zombies or slaves that they see as empty bodies in death.