One of Conrad's harshest critics has been Chinua Achebe. Achebe has written several novels about Africa that invoke the perspective of Africans, not of invading Europeans. In Achebe's Things Fall Apart, the account is told in narrative form rather than historical reportage, and this makes it somewhat more subjectively interesting to the average reader. Achebe describes how life was lived before colonization, before the abuses of Marlow's Company and others like it.
In addition, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” are superficially similar. This is not to say that by superficiality, we mean that the structure of the prose or...