The Role of Kurtz’s Intended in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

In the first parts of the book most of the characters Marlow meets tell him all good things about Kurtz. When Marlow inquires about who Kurtz is he is told by the chief account of the company that Kurtz is, "a first class agent...he is a very remarkable person." (p. 33). Another person tells Marlow that Kurtz

There can be multiple inferences from the clues that Conrad gives us. It is adding to the novel and giving the meaning. It could mean that there is just as much “darkness” in Europe as there is in Africa. Conrad’s main character, Marlow, has never been one that was easy to read or figure out. So why should the intended message be given to us plainly?

An interpretation of Marlow's changing feelings towards Kurtz is that he ends up being disgusted and

Both Kingsolver and Conrad use similar story construction and point of view in these texts. The truly pivotal characters in each text, rather than the narrators, are the mostly unspoken antagonists of the story. In Heart of Darkness, the story is centered on Kurtz and his actions involving the Congo. The true focus of the novella lies not with Marlow, but rather Conrad uses Marlow as a medium in order to examine Kurtz. In the novella, Marlow is an outside observer. The story follows Marlow’s ever-changing perception of Kurtz in order to characterize the unseen character. When Marlow first learns of Kurtz, he is told that he is “a remarkable person…a prodigy” (Conrad 69), but as the story progresses, both Marlow and the reader delve into Kurtz’s true character and discover a tyrant of imperialism.

    Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is full of oppositions.  The most obvious is the juxtaposition of darkness and light, which are both present from the very beginning, in imagery and in metaphor.  The novella is a puzzling mixture of anti-imperialism and racism, civilization and savagery, idealism and nihilism.  How can they be reconciled?  The final scene, in which Marlow confronts Kurtz's Intended, might be expected to provide resolution.  However, it seems, instead, merely to focus the dilemmas in the book, rather than solving them.

What makes Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness more than the run of the mill adventure tale, is its moral complexity. By the end of the novel, we find a protagonist who has immense appreciation for a man who lacks honest redemption, the mysterious Mr. Kurtz. It is the literal vivaciousness and unyielding spirit of this man, his pure intentionality, which Marlow finds so entrancing and which leaves the reader with larger questions regarding the human capacity. Therefore, Heart of Darkness is profoundly different given its character complexity and ambiguous narrative technique which ultimately deliver home a message of the complex motivations and capabilities of mankind.

We are always taught to appreciate the little things in life; the things that don’t seem to have much of significance at first but end up meaning the world to us. These small things have a value so great but so hidden that they are usually taken a granted for. In The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, there are a few characters that aren’t present in the book for a large amount of time but have a great affect on the story. Kurtz is one of these characters. Kurtz is introduced towards the end of the story but he has an affect on the action, the theme and the other characters development even when he isn’t present.

Conrad uses light as a symbol of civilization. Just as darkness is defined as the absence of light, the black jungle represents the absence of white man’s civilization - a civilization marked by corruption and evil. Conrad’s description of Brussels in part one is an example of how he uses detail to convey deeper meaning. “In a very few hours I arrived at a city that always made me think of a white sepulcher.” (953) It is significant that Conrad describes the building Marlow departs from as a white coffin, because the offices in that building are driven by greed and their job is sending men out to their almost certain deaths. The white men in the white town send sailors in search of their white prize, ivory. This cycle of evil begins and ends in this town. Describing the town as white is deceptive, because the town itself possesses an ominous feeling of death. This symbolizes the deception of all the sailors who come to this town in hopes of finding fortune and are sent to their deaths. Conrad makes it clear that this is a deception not found in the darkness of the jungle. When Marlow approaches dying slaves in the darkness of a shaded cove, he states: “They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now, - nothing but black

     Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad is a novel about a man named Marlow and his journey into the depths of the African Congo. Marlow is in search of a man named Kurtz, an ivory trader. Though Marlow?s physical journey seems rather simple, it takes him further into his own heart and soul than into the Congo. The setting, symbols and characters each contain light and dark images, these images shape the central theme of the novel.

Darkness is everything that is unknown, primitive, evil, and impenetrable.  To Conrad, Africa is the very representation of darkness.  Marlow often uses the phrase, "We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness" (Conrad 68), to describe his progress on the Congo.  By traveling farther and farther down the Congo, Marlow and his crew get closer and closer to the epicenter of this foreboding darkness, to the black heart of evil.  Because of Africa's physical immensity and thick jungles, it appeared to be a land of the unknown where "the silence . . . went home to one's very heart-its mystery, its greatness, the amazing reality of its concealed life"(56). This portrayal of Africa as both a romantic frontier and a foreboding wilderness continues to dominate in the minds of Westerners even today.

In the book, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad we are introduced to the concept of light and dark as they relate to the people of Africa and the people of Europe. In the beginning of the book the intro gives an insight into the journey that the main character, Marlow, is about to embark on. Conrad symbolically introduces the sun setting on the river as Marlow enters the mouth of the Thames. Conrad reveals this allegory by indicating that Marlow is about to enter a dark place morally, and physically as a reference to the Negro people of Africa. Light and dark are used by Conrad to represent morality and immorality.

There are essentially very few differences between Marlow and Kurtz. A main and apparent difference between the two men is what they love. It is evident to all that Kurtz feels a deep affection towards ivory. An affection even more so than for his fiancée. Marlow describes is as, “The wilderness…had caressed him…it had taken him, loved him, embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flush, and sealed his soul to its own..” (Conrad 48). Marlow, on the other hand has an undying love of adventure and exploration. There is more than just that way do these two men differ from each other. At some point along his journey, Marlow finds himself idolizing and obsessing over Kurtz, just as the natives do. What is it about Kurtz that makes him so enchanting?

Beyond the shield of civilization and into the depths of a primitive, untamed frontier lies the true face of the human soul. It is in the midst of this savagery and unrelenting danger that mankind confronts the brooding nature of his inner self.  Joseph Conrad’s novel, Heart of Darkness, is the story of one man's insight into life as he embarks on a voyage to the edges of the world. Here, he meets the bitter, yet enlightening forces that eventually shape his outlook on life and his own individuality. Conrad’s portrayal of the characters, setting, and symbols, allow the reader to reflect on the true nature of man.

The constant change in scenery throughout the Heart of Darkness contributes heavily to the meaning of the novel as a whole, for it allows the novel’s author, Joseph Conrad, to expand on the effects the physical journey of travelling through the Congo has on the inner mentailites of the characters- Marlow and Kurtz- in the novel. Conrad’s continuous comparisons between characters, their surroundings, and the plot, create the genuine progression of the novel, while the physical journey that is taken allows the characters to make their own discovery of humankind. As Kurtz’s destiny and the struggles he overcomes go on to deeply affect the two characters’ journey through the story’s plot, as everything in the Heart of Darkness is linked or comes back to Kurtz and all the wrongful actions he has committed in the Congo- as he was the perpetrator of all the darkness in the novel to begin with.

  Kurtz was a personal embodiment, a dramatization, of all that Conrad felt of futility, degradation, and horror in what the Europeans in the Congo called 'progress,' which meant the exploitation of the natives by every variety of cruelty and treachery known to greedy man. Kurtz was to Marlow, penetrating this country, a name, constantly recurring in people's talk, for cleverness and enterprise. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is a portrait of the degeneration of the ideal of Kurtz symbolizing the degeneration of the ideal of colonialism as 'civilizing work'.