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Heart Of Darkness Kurtz Journey

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A Journey into Darkness in Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad, in his story, "Heart of Darkness," tells the

tale of two mens' realization of the dark and evil side of themselves.

Marlow, the "second" narrator of the framed narrative, embarked upon a

spiritual adventure on which he witnessed firsthand the wicked potential in

everyone. On his journey into the dark, forbidden Congo, Marlow encountered

Kurtz, a "remarkable man" and

"universal genius," who had made himself a god in the eyes of the natives

over whom he had an imperceptible power. These two men were, in a sense,

images of each other: Marlow was what Kurtz may have been, and Kurtz was

what Marlow may have become. …show more content…

Exposed to the

unfamiliar emotional and physical demands of the African wilderness, free

to do exactly as he chose, Kurtz plunged into horrible orgies of which

human sacrifice and cannibalism seemed to have formed a part. These

excesses taught him and Marlow what human nature was actually like: "The

horror!" Kurtz gasped before he died. Marlow's own journey from Belgium to

the Congo and thence up the river then took on the aspect of a man's

journey into his own inner depths. Marlow was saved from the other man's

fate not by higher principles or a better disposition, but merely because

he happened to be very busy, and the demands of work were themselves a

discipline. The readers perceive, too, that other white men on the Congo

refrained from such excesses, if they did so, only because they had lesser,

more timorous natures which did not dare to express themselves completely.

Marlow felt that he had taken the lid off something horrible in the very

depths of man which he could not explain when he returned to the world

where basic instincts had been carefully smoothed over. Faced by a crisis,

he even denied what he had seen to Kurtz's Intended, though he was appalled

by his lie as bringing with it a betrayal of truth which was essentially a

kind of death.

In "Heart of Darkness" the sense of human waste that pervaded the

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