The Hypocrisy Of The West Towards The East

The thesis stresses the analysis of the social and theoretical background of"the Other"in Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now by applying the postcolonial theory. Conrad's writing provides the readers with opportunities to probe deeper into the identities of people in postcolonial societies, and to be more aware of the importance of connecting the Self and the Other. Joseph Conrad, a typical postcolonial writer with a complex background, has fallen, consciously or unconsciously, into the trap of depicting people in the postcolonial societies as the Other.In his writings, people in postcolonial societies are struggling for creating a new national identity from the tangled remnants of colonial domination. Besides, his works are full of the ambivalent attitude toward postcolonial society and the former colonies. Heart of Darkness discloses the sociopolitical turmoil of postcolonial condition of the country, which shows Conrad's embarking on a mature phase of writing on contemporary colonial and postcolonial societies.Francis Ford Coppola adapted the novel for a film called Apocalypse Now. Few people have ever made the comparison between Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now. Zhang Jinghui chooses the novel-film adaptation as its subject. Different from the studies popular nowadays, the thesis intended to probe into the adaption of Apocalypse Now, based on Conrad's Heart of Darkness, reflecting on its process of creative transformation and that of its aesthetic appreciation, in light of the classical Chinese aesthetics. It is also intended to reveal the aesthetics as possibly having a unique interpretative power and function in the artistic evaluation and judgment on film.The postcolonial reading of the novel and the film are analyzed in the perspective of Orientalism. Postcolonial theories analyze the situations or conditions which produce the colonial Other. It is because of the existence of the Other that the consciousness and the authority of the subject are established. Therefore, the superiority of the West is established by regarding the colonized as the inferior other. The thesis narrates the representations of the Other in the film and the novel. It examines the otherness of the East, and describes the attitudes of the British and the America. This thesis will focus more on the circumstances of peripheral countries such as Africa and Vietnam as the inferior other. Postcolonial theory will be applied to analyze the marginalized people. The thesis aims at revealing how the West treats the East as the Other in different aspects. It also discloses that hypocrisy of the West towards the East reflected in the novel and the film in postcolonial perspectives. In addition, the colonization would shift from military to ideology and culture domination and still come into existence in the modern society, which would bring more sufferings to the natives.Through analyzing the relationship between the British and colonial Africa and the America and the Vietnam, postcolonial theory depict how the West treats the East as the Other in order to control it in politics, economics, ideology and culture, and creates its own knowledge and cultural thinking.