I like this idea, that the wasted and rather pathetic man we meet instead of the Great Kurtz is symbolic of the hollowness at the core of the Europeans' professed ideals. The main problem I have with it in the context of the novella, though, is that Marlow continues to find something extraordinary about Kurtz. I dismissed M's view at first, but I think it deserves more attention in light of the trust M. establishes as an observer. He is wise, I think. He knows, for example, that the Eurpoeans are a rapacious bunch and that their talk of improving the Africans is bunk.Robert Tulip wrote: The trouble with Kurtz is that the 'redeeming idea' is so flagrantly at odds with the sordid reality that a rather gross deflation is inevitable on the slightest examination. I think the horror is what Kurtz has done to other human beings to get ivory.
Marlow has a sense that he is identified with Kurtz; he comes recommended by the same people that recommended Kurtz, and he finds that the traders think he might have an "in" with Kurtz. So he has this sense of relation to Kurtz that he doesn't welcome, but it's there. (Conrad developed this idea of shared identity fully in his story "The Secret Sharer.")
What's there to admire about Kurtz, though? His achievement, although perverted, is impressive. He single-handedly forges an empire of sorts in the Congo, which would take considerable charisma. (Later, an aquaintance tells M. that K could have been a politician who could ignite the masses).
M. admires him, in death, for a different reason. When K. says his last words ("The horror, the horror"), M. says, "I went no more near the remarkable man who had pronounced a judgment upon the adventures of his soul on this earth." He seems to think that K.'s last words show that he has a moment of illumination at the end, realization that he had let himself be captured by many "powers of darkness," as M. says earlier. Or maybe "the horror" is not just about Kurtz, but applies in a wider way to the humans, who all have this darkness at heart.
Most of us wouldn't be capable of such a "summing up," Marlow says. He himself would have probably spoken only a word of "careless contempt" because, at the end of life, we don't have thought of much besides the pity of our own demise. K.s cry at the end was "an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions. But it was a victory!"
M. doesn't die of his own illness, but remained "to dream the nightmare out to the end, and to show my loyalty to Kurtz once more. Destiny. My Destiny!"
Not saying I understand this entirely or accept it, but it has a depth that makes it hard to dismiss. And it seems, to me, to be the "heart" of the novella.