Character Portrayal of Kurtz In Heart Of Darkness

Heart of Darkness is one of the best novels of the 20th century. The central idea of this novel—darkness is the true nature of our world—gets into the veins of the story. This type of darkness will break human, as it did to Kurtz.  Through Marlow’s narration, we can see how Kurtz, who came to Africa full of hopes, deteriorated physically and spiritually at last. Though Kurtz seemed to be the most successful and capable man that Marlow met during his journey, his life was actually a tragedy.

Heart of Darkness: Inner Part

Mr. Kurtz, is an agent of the Belgian trading company and he acquires the status of a man-God among the savages of the whole region. He becomes a cult figure for them and begins to share many of the beliefs, superstitions and bestial customs of these people. Driven by the two temptations: the desire to make a fortune through ivory and the desire to discover latent kinship with the savages, Kurtz yielded to their combined power by using his authority as deity to help him attain his goals. But he should not be viewed as simply a man that did everything under his own wills. On the contrary, he was a representative of the European colonizers, and his behaviour represented the wills of what he belonged to. 

Greediness is a common character of colonizers. At the beginning, Kurtz seemed to be quite successful in his purchase, and he was famous for his great eloquence, his absolute power at the Inner Station and his outstanding capacity in collecting ivories. And his cruelty was proved to be the most powerful weapon for him to rule his place. For Kurtz, there was no moral restraint since all the natives there were only “brutes” at the Inner Station, and he had the right to deal with them freely as they all belonged to him. To make sure that they would go and collect ivory for him, he used the guns in his hands and the “great thoughts” in his mind.

The abnormal greediness of Kurtz lied in his absurd belief that everything belonged to him, and he wouldn’t sacrifice any of the goals for the sake of another. Kurtz’s success in upholding the Inner Station and his position as well as the ivory collection actually predicted his doomed fate of being a victim, since he was the representative of the colonizers who would take advantages of the weaker part as the General Manager did to him when he was dying.

Actually everything that was about Kurtz was short: his fame as an eloquent orator, his career as an ivory agent, and his life as well. Yet his influence on some particular people  like Marlow lasted for a long time. It is natural but regretful that this man didn’t gain his happiness after working so hard. Marlow was the only one there that showed great sympathy to Kurtz, especially when he saw that Kurtz was fighting with himself—his evil soul that knew no restraint, no fain and no fear. However, we feel very regretful for Kurtz because he was the victims of history, and the goals of colonization and enslavement that he had devoted himself to have been proved wrong by time.

The origin of Kurtz’s tragedy is the civilized yet depraved society. From the way Marlow got the job as captain of a steamboat for the Trade Company, we can see that Kurtz was the same kind with Marlow, because the same people who sent him specially also recommended Marlow. No wonder the people on board with him considered Marlow as a man of prospect just as they though of Kurtz. This is a case that reflects the decadence of the social system of Kurtz’s time.

So to conclude we can say that Kurtz is like the devil-incarnate, because he had crossed over to the evil side completely. His soul was consumed by the evil tendencies. In fact, Marlow feels that if he stayed any longer in that evil atmosphere, he too would be sucked into it. Conrad seems to be suggesting that evil tendencies are lying dormant in every human being, be it Marlow or Kurtz. But in an atmosphere that encourages them, these latent tendencies grow up to manifest themselves and whether they are suppressed and fought against, or given a free reign as done by Kurtz, depends on the human strength of character.