An Eternal Conrad

The final pages of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness reproduce Marlow’s anxiety in the reader. The novel gravitates around Kurtz, his life, and his legacy. He symbolized direction and guidance, giving the expedition purpose. But with his appearance comes the “turn of the tide” (1). He is no longer guidance but an enigma, a being that was so many things at once and nothing at all. On their voyage back to civilization, this mysterious character dies. His last words: “The horror! The horror!”(130). How are we to interpret this?

Let us regress to a living Kurtz. This mysterious individual chose to dwell in the remote corners of the African wilderness. Marlow’s expedition was one to the unknown, to the core of Conrad’s own mind in search for him. When he finds Kurtz, he encounters much resistance in taking him back to civilization. Living in the wild, he had found an escape from all the pressures of a materialistic society. It was his form of rebellion against the atrocities of the human heart. Consequently, Conrad employs this encounter to juxtapose the civilized and the uncivilized. As Marlow blows the whistles of his ship, “two thousand eyes followed the evolutions of the splashing, thumping, fierce, river demon beating the water with its terrible tail and breathing black smoke into the air” (125). By employing demonic imagery in describing the industrialized nations, Conrad exhibits the destructiveness and greed of the human heart.

However, Kurtz does not make it back to the world he fled from. Marlow witnessed how his life began to “ebb out of his heart into the sea of inexorable time” (127). Here, inexorable time refers to the unalterable mortality of humans, to the insignificance of an individual when put in the context of eternal time. And as Kurtz felt the last breath leave his lungs, a weak and yet desperate cry gave way to his last words: “The horror! The horror!”. There is no definite interpretation for his final words, for they are extremely ambiguous. However, I think they might mean one of two things. First, in muttering ambiguity Kurtz incites mystery and interminable enigma. In doing so he was taking a hit at immortality by leaving the end to his story open. On the other hand, Kurtz might have been condemning the horrors of the human heart. His rejection to the atrocities of civilization was so real that he would rather die than face “the horrors” he initially fled from.

Eventually, a connection between Kurtz and Conrad may be evident. Heart of Darkness comes to an end amidst much ambiguity. Conrad’s novel poses similar enigmas as Kurtz' final words. Maybe they are both rebelling against society, or maybe Conrad wanted a grab at immortality. We are left alongside Marlow to interpret what we have read and try to give it meaning. These pages are the means through which reader and Conrad will continue to interact long after mortality takes her claim.