Charlie Marlow Human Greed

The jungle. The habitat of dense, impenetrable foliage containing dark corpses of the weathered and secrets from the unknown is where Marlow enters as a naive chap and leaves with newfound personal intelligence. Charlie Marlow, the protagonist in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, aboards a journey as a member of an ivory company in the Congo in order to find Mr. Kurtz along with his ivory. In a setting so foreign to his general comforts, Marlow faces a question of how to make sense of a senseless world in which barbaric behavior is overpowering empathy due to human greed. By embarking on this spiritual journey through the psychological trials of the wilderness, Marlow conveys the ability to comprehend who he is an a human being. Specifically,
This group of five white males travel downriver to seek treasure and exploit African ivory; the symbol of European greed. Without having to converse greatly with the pack, Marlow observed them as a boorish clique fixated on profit, incapable of empathy. To Marlow these men symbolize the selfish motivations of Europeans that will cause greater harm than good at which point he proclaims after finding all the group’s doney’s dead, “evidently the appetite for more ivory had got the better of the...less material aspirations” (Conrad 55) It is through the Eldorado’s corrupt nature triggering disastrous consequences that Marlow learns more about himself. Particularly, Mayer explains it as such, “Intelligences enable people to reason about a matter at hand, to see ideas from different angles, and to arrive at good answers” (Mayer). Thus, Marlow’s personal intelligence develops more as he encounters the European Conquerors, for through their greed-driven, careless actions they are never to be found again and have only caused greater harm to nature at which Marlow grasps from their
Due to this theme, Marlow encounters Mr. Kurtz precisely to enhance his personal intelligence through understanding that human nature contains the potential for both good and evil. Explicitly, Marlow experiences the most significant character change in the duration he spends with Mr. Kurtz, for Marlow is so fixated to the point of obsession in finding Kurtz that when he finally does he realized he was searching for someone that didn’t exist the same way anymore. The supposed “‘very remarkable man’” (Conrad 22) left Marlow’s high expectations abandoned in which he began questioning himself of, “ sometimes what it all meant” (Conrad 25). Mr. Kurtz is a symbol of the potential for good that is corrupted by evil in human nature. Specifically, despite the fact that Kurtz exploits African Natives and destroys the balance of nature in seek of ivory, he has a display of shrunken, African heads on display which especially shows the evil in human nature in which Marlow describes it as Kurtz lacking, “restraint in the gratification of his various lusts” (Conrad 56). Marlow illustrates his disagreeance and personal intelligence of the corrupt element of human nature by explaining it as, “[their] strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others” (Conrad 12). Mimicking a vampire style literary archetype of sucking the life out of the