Kerr's Reversals

In Douglas Kerr’s article “Three Ways of Going Wrong” I really liked his last main point. Kerr pointed out that Waiting for the Barbarians and Heart of Darkness both have a similar plot in which one character, Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, and the Magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians, “goes wrong” by departing from his cultural identity by adopting, fostering, or accepting the juxtaposed culture of the native people as laudable or/and as his own culture. What makes these two books different, though, is the lens through which we see each story. In Heart of Darkness we hear the story through Marlow’s oration about a man “gone wrong,” but in Waiting for the Barbarians we see the story as it happens through the eyes of the actual man who has “gone wrong.” After understanding Kerr’s point about “going wrong” it seems to me that these books are very much almost the same book, but from the other point of view.

One problem in reversing the books to make them very much resemble each other is the narrator. Originally, in Waiting for the Barbarians, the story is told from the point of view of the man “gone wrong.” Waiting for the Barbarians to be reversed into Heart of Darkness would need a character who had not “gone wrong” to retell the story. Colonel Joll has not “gone wrong” in Kerr’s meaning of the phrase. What makes him fit this description is that Colonel Joll would tell his story of the Magistrate the way Marlow tells his story of Kurtz: that the Magistrate and Kurtz had “gone wrong” and gone mad as they grew more and more interested and connected to the native/barbarian culture.
To change the narrators in the other direction, Heart of Darkness to Waiting for the Barbarians, Kurtz would have to tell his story in the way the Magistrate tells his story. In this switch these narrators would makes their “going wrong” seem logical and justified and not actually “going wrong,” the way the Magistrate does in Heart of Darkness, just as it seems logical and justified that the two are indeed “going wrong” according to the narrations of Colonel Joll and Marlow.

The other problem is time. In Waiting for the Barbarians all of the action takes place in present time, but Heart of Darkness is a frame story, in which Marlow looks back on his experience in the Congo. To reverse these stories Colonel Joll would have tell the story as he looks back on his experience with the Magistrate. The Heart of Darkness to Waiting for the Barbarian reversal is much easier, as Kurtz would just tell his story as it was happening, the way the Magistrate does.

Since these two basic changes can reverse the two stories, these two stories clearly are very similar. Both, through slightly different methods, effectively raise questions about imperialism, war, empires, race, and especially, which path is truly “going wrong,” which is why the two books are both strikingly similar and also strikingly effective. (505)