Significance of the Last Words of Kurtz: The Horror! In Heart of Darkness

Mr. Kurtz is one of the two dominating figures in the novel, Heart of Darkness the other being Marlow, the chief narrator. He is as agent of the Belgian Trading Company in the Congo. He remains an enigma or a mysterious character to the readers form beginning to the end of the novel. The Chie Accountant describes him as a “remarkable man”, very useful to the company for collecting ivory. The Manager of the Central Station and the Brickmaker also praise Kurtz for his efficiency but Marlow estimates him to be an embodiment of evil.

In his early life Kurtz was a man of sound sense and noble ideas and for this he was admired throughout the whole of Europe.

But Mr. Kurtz’s prolonged stay among the brutes had transformed him into a savage. Instead of civilizing the savages, he fell an easy prey to the influence of those men and began to share their way of life and customs. While staying at the Inner Station, Kurtz was seized with a kind of wilderness. Ivory which he was to collect for his company, became his passion. The word “ivory” was always on his lips. Next to ivory, his greatest concern was his love for the girl he proposed to marry. Even greater than his love for his fiancée, and greater than his passion for ivory was the fascination which the wilderness soon began to exercise upon him. The wilderness seemed to have consumed his flesh and spirit, and transformed his whole being completely.

Ultimately Mr. Kurtz became extremely greedy. A time came when Mr. Kurtz wanted to keep all the ivory for himself instead of allowing the company to take it away from him. But greed is only a small example of evil in this man. In certain other respects, he became the very embodiment of evil. He began to identify himself with the native savages and in fact, became one of them.

Marlow tells us that Mr. Kurtz began to gratify all his various lusts and monstrous passions, and occupy a high place among the devils of the land. In other words, Mr. Kurtz became evil incarnate.

Thus we see that all the primitive instincts which lie dormant in a human being, had in the case of Mr. Kurtz, risen to the surface, because of his continuous contact with the savages. Consequently in his death bed he was found in a terrible situation. He uttered the words “The horror! The horror!”. These words signify the evil in Mr. Kurtz, and show his horror at what might happen to him after death when he goes to hell.

To sum up, Mr. Kurtz represents the imperial exploitation of the backward people by the white invaders. The transformation of Mr. Karts, a civilized man into a devil conveys to us Conrad’s ideas about evil and sinfulness.