introduction

« Introduction:     This piece of research falls within comparative literature, it epitomize a study of the most important theme of the twentieth century, the relationship between western and non-western societies which highlight the imperial ideology of westerners.

For Europeans the African are burden for the white men who come to civilize them. Starting from this idea, many novels and essays shows the differences between colonized and the colonizer such in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902) and Albert Camus's The Stranger (1942), these two novels are among the cultural forms which capture the imperial enterprise and its consequences on the natives.

After the publication of the two novels, we have noticed that both of them have received a lot of criticism.     Many critics have seen Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness(1902) as imperialist and racists novel, in An Image of Africa(1975), Chinua Achebe points out Conrad's portrayal of the Africans as “basically speechless” and “rudimentary souls” (255) of Africa.

According to the same critic Achebe accuses Joseph Conrad of being a thoroughgoing racist for depicting Africa as the other world.      Another critics made by Edward Said is that Conrad “as a creature of his time could not grant natives their freedom” (Edward said, Culture and Imperialism, 34).

In the same critic Edward Said argues that  “Westerners may have physically left their old colonies in Africa and Asia, but they retained them not only as a market but as locals on the ideological map over which they continued to rule morally and intellectually” (ibid.27).     In the same context, Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism(1994) offers a lot of critics to Camus's The Stranger(1942), in this respect, Said shows that Camus did not agree with the idea of Algeria as a free nation without a French control, for this he support his view with what Camus have written:. »