Why is kurtz important in heart of darkness

He's basically become a child, and not a nice one, either: a greedy, selfish, and brutal playground bully. Or as Marlow so beautifully says, the "powers of darkness have claimed him for their own" 2.

Marlow ends up refining his obsession with Kurtz all the way down to one particular aspect: his voice. He's not excited about seeing Kurtz or shaking his hand or talking about last night's Lakers game, he says—just hearing him talk.

This little narrative interruption drives home just how important Kurtz's voice is. Now consider this: Marlow, sitting on the Nellie and telling his story in the pitch-dark, is explicitly described as "no more to us than a voice" to the men that listen 2.

And then, When he finds an "appeal" in the "fiendish row" of the Africans dancing on shore, he negates it with the claim, "I have a voice, too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced" 2. So is this voice business merely another tool to establish connections between Marlow and Kurtz? If Marlow's voice is never silenced, what about Kurtz's? The guy dies, after all. But are his last words resonant for us? Does Heart of Darkness end on a note of "horror"? The native Africans worship Kurtz like a god, even attacking to keep Kurtz with them.

But here's the irony: we're not sure whether Kurtz orders the attack or whether the native Africans do it on their own we get conflicting stories from the harlequin. Kurtz may be a god, but he's also a prisoner to his devotees. He can order mass killings of rebels, but he can't walk away freely. Ready for some more irony? Kurtz was apparently seven feet tall or so although we figure Marlow was riding the hyperbole train here.

But his name means "short" in German—which Marlow makes sure to point out, just in case we're not caught up with our Rosetta Stone cassettes. So, his name contradicts his god-like height, a discrepancy that reflects the big fat lie of his life and death, and which we're thinking means his life as a god was also false. First, is Kurtz mad? Um, yes. We think that jamming a bunch of heads on sticks might qualify, but if that weren't enough, Marlow makes sure we know that, although the man's intelligence is clear, Kurtz's "soul [is] mad" 3.

And then his madness becomes physical, so that his bodily sickness is a reflection of his diseased mind. His slow, painful spiral into death is marked by visions and unintelligible ravings. Parts of the narrative recount the emptiness of Kurtz's soul; this may be a commentary on the debilitating and devastating power of the wilderness to suck all the humanity out of a man.

Marlow fobs him off with the bombastic report, which the journalist accepts happily enough. Politically, Conrad tended to be on the right, and this image of Kurtz as an extremist demagogue expresses a habitual pessimism about mass democracy — in , still a relatively recent phenomenon. These concerns about political populism also resonate with recent democratic processes in the US and the UK, among other places.

Nor does Conrad have any patience with complacent European beliefs about racial superiority. Nonetheless, the novel also contains representations of Africans that would rightly be described as racist if they were written today. One response to this criticism is to argue, as Paul B. Armstrong does , that the lack of more rounded Congolese characters is the point. If Achebe did not succeed in having Heart of Darkness struck from the canon, he did ensure that academics writing about the novel could no longer ignore the question of race.

For Urmila Seshagiri , Heart of Darkness shows that race is not the stable, scientific category that many Victorians thought it was. It is entirely appropriate, in more ways than one, for Hamid to allude to Conrad in a novel about global mobility. The paradox of Heart of Darkness is that it seems at once so improbable and so necessary. It is impossible not to be astonished, when you think of it, that a Polish ex-sailor, writing in his third language, was ever in a position to author such a story, on such a subject.

But, when Marlow gets to meet him in person, he is very different from what he thought he would be. He meets a Kurtz that is greatly ill and notably mentally unstable. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself, and, by heavens! I tell you, it had gone mad. His mother was half-English, his father was half-French. This tells us that Kurtz is someone who comes from a background that is seen as one that is very educated and prestigous. Many people can only imagine a wild animal or savage being capable of killing someone.

As the story approaches its end, Mr. Kurtz unfortunately dies, but before he does, he says what might be the best known words in the story. As they are all headed back, Marlow hears Kurtz talking to himself. The horror! These words that Kurtz says can be interpreted as him remembering all the horrific things he did to get his ivory. This is where he reaches the realization that he did many immoral things and that he was carried away by his desire and greed of getting the most ivory.

He finally sees the reality, and that is that his once good heart, had been completely transformed into a heart full of darkness. Accessed November 11, Download paper. Essay, Pages 5 words. Don't use plagiarized sources.