The Horror of the Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness, a novella written by Joseph Conrad, is a sort of monologue by a sailor named Marlow. Marlow’s journey through the Congo left him in a very emotionally shaken state, as he witnessed multiple deaths, corpses, diseases, and other such calamities. But throughout all of this, Marlow fixates on the most elusive character, a European worshipped by the natives by the name of Kurtz. Kurtz is portrayed as a very talented man; owing his artistic, musical, and literary skills to a high upbringing in Europe. He later becomes known as also the most talented ivory exporter in the Congo as well. Kurtz’s death, the pinnacle of the novella, reveals to those reading that Kurtz is terrified, of what exactly is uncertain, as he screams aloud “The Horror! The horror!” (144) The most correct interpretation of this statement would be that Kurtz’s upbringing in Europe made him an ignorant and greedy man, and thus, when he travels to the congo, leads him to become a tyrannical leader of both the company (for whom both Kurtz and Milo work for) and the natives. Africa had only shown Kurtz what was hidden within himself the entire time: A heart of darkness.

Kurtz was most likely born with a predisposition to money in the same way a dowsing rod is predisposed to find water. Kurtz was amazing at getting the ivory he needs, needs, and not wants, as when Marlow first speaks to Kurtz’s caretaker in the jungle, the caretaker mentions that “[Kurtz] would shoot [him] unless [he] gave him the ivory,” ivory given to Kurtz’s caretaker as a gift for hunting big game. The well-to-do Kurtz had his normal personality slowly corroded by his experiences in the jungle, but these experiences all involved a commodity collected for vanity purposes. Seeking the class and supposed money he once had, Kurtz turns to ivory as an addiction and a symbol of his new found wealth. European Society’s normal effects on Kurtz have no hold over him any longer, and thus his true animal does show. Masked under titles such as artist, writer, and musician, Kurtz had been noted as no such “ordinary man,” (125) and yet, surprisingly, these remnants of his past life follow him into the Congo, but are no longer apart of himself; Europe’s grasp over his mind is released and allows him to become just another “savage.”

Kurtz’s hoarding of ivory is completely trivial; he has no real use for it, but became addicted to the prospect of gathering more and more, as if ivory were some sort of drug. Though he works for the company, whose goal it was to gather as much ivory as possible, Kurtz still does not send his stockpile of ivory to their base of operations, and therefore does not get paid, meaning Kurtz had only his hut and his ivory to his name. But because Europe values ivory, and Kurtz is the epitome of all that is European, he is mentally wired to gather as much ivory as possible and keep it to himself. He even went so far as to slaughter enemies of a certain African tribe only so that they may assist him in his conquest for ivory. He would stop at nothing to get even the smallest amount of ivory, and it was this untamed lust which drives him to lose sight of everything but the dead-elephant tusks. His mind is gone, and the cause is the crusade against Elephants by the popular European fashion industry of the time. Being that “All of Europe contributed to the making” (117) of Kurtz, it is not difficult to see why both Kurtz and Europe want all the ivory to themselves, and will go to any means to do so. While Kurtz threatens the lives of others, Europe sends people just like Kurtz, but with much less of a relevant backstory, into the Congo to also aid in taking down the most dangerous animal in Africa for a cosmetic object of appeal.

Kurtz’s famous finals words, “The horror! The horror!” (144) point to him finally having his moment of enlightenment, as he “cried in a whisper at some knowledge[...] at some image, at some vision[.]” His realization being that his true being shone through only because of Europe’s abandonment of Kurtz. He was fully nurtured there, made to think like aristocrats in a logical way. But once Kurtz had been hung out to dry in the Congo, he lost that sense of care and safety, and also his logic, only to be left with his emotional reactions to each situation he encounters. In his final moments, Kurtz had finally regained a sense of this logic and realized what he had become because of Europe’s twisted grip on his being. He realizes how terrible his late existence is because of what level he had sunken to; the level of a savage. Oblivious to his surroundings he says “the horror” twice, twice to reiterate just how terrible of a person he had always been but did not now. The first cry was a realization, the second, an acceptance of the truth.

In summary, Kurtz begins his life with a heart of darkness and carries it with him subtly until reaching the Congo, where he is then unbound and permitted to act how he pleased without any intervention from Europe. He only realizes how terrible he had always been moments before death, and how Europe had kept his darker side chained up like a punished dog. Europe made Kurtz a time bomb, ready to blow up at any moment. And when Kurtz does finally blow, he shows not the well-educated, proper Kurtz of Europe, but rather a parallel, the Kurtz with a blazing heart of darkness.