Creating Unstable Images

OTHERNESS
(i)Geographical/Physical Otherness
“Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as "the other world," the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where a man's vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality.”(para 8, Achebe)

(ii)Cultural/ Social Otherness
“…what thrilled you was just the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise”
(as quoted of Heart of Darkness in Para 12 of Achebe)

Here is the idea of the
(i)Relation of other to the self and
(ii) that (shocking) self realization of similarities (rather than the differences between)
What is it really that is different/dissimilar?

PORTRAYAL:
(i)Narration and authorial interjection(s)
“Certainly, Conrad appears to go to considerable pains to set up layers of insulation between himself and the moral universe of his story. He has, for example, a narrator behind a narrator.”(para 16, Achebe)

(ii)Western Interpretations- exoticization/stereotyping and general deliberate inaccuracy:
“As I said earlier, Conrad did not originate the image of Africa which we find in his book. It was and is the dominant image of Africa in the Western imagination and Conrad merely brought the peculiar gifts of his own mind to bear on it.(para 30, Achebe)

The question to ask here, as it was with A Passage to India, is what can we really glean from the western view of a non western continent in terms of its geography, peoples and culture? If the narrator is crutched by another narrator, the implication of multiple perspectives and constantly altering views/representations is surely one that complicates and possibly destabilizes the notion(s) of western ‘supremacy’?

Thoughts?