Before coming to Africa, Kurtz has been asked by “the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs” to write up “a report, for its future guidance.” (Conrad appears to have drawn the title of this organization from L‘Association Internationale pour l’Exploration et la Civilisation en Afrique—the International Association for Exploration and Civilization in Africa—which was headed by King Leopold.) The essay, which he has evidently written before his breakdown, describes how Europeans, allegedly further along in the evolutionary process than members of other races, “can exert a power for good practically unbounded” by presenting themselves to non-Europeans as “supernatural beings.” It continues for seventeen pages that are “vibrating with eloquence” but ends startlingly with a phrase that has been “scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand... : ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’” (p. 92). By devolving from expansive, refined eloquence into terse, primal utterance, the document thus reflects the atavistic transformation of this paragon of European civilization that ironically renders him more savage than the so-called savages. A major theme of Conrad’s writings generally is the notion that the fallibility of human nature leads idealistic people to fall short of their aspirations—in fact, to fall a distance that is directly proportional to the loftiness of those aspirations. This principle is exemplified in the career of Kurtz, whose airy idealism is represented as equal and opposite to his bestial cruelty, a tension neatly captured in the disparity between his eloquent report and its barbaric postscript.

Marlow reflects on the significance of Kurtz’s career while recounting the moments preceding the latter’s death, which occurs as they are making their way back downriver:

Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn’t touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror—of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath—

“The horror! The horror!” (p. 115).

Although Marlow himself does not offer a definitive interpretation of this deathbed scene, especially compelling among the broad range of readings this famous passage has received is the suggestion that it sums up Kurtz’s Conradian insight into the basic depravity of human nature as he briefly returns to lucidity before his death. Conrad’s friend the great mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell observed that Heart of Darkness “expresses... most completely [Conrad‘s] philosophy of life”: “he thought of civilized and morally tolerable human life as a dangerous walk on a thin crust of barely cooled lava which at any moment might break and let the unwary sink into fiery depths” (The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, p. 321). Kurtz has evidently fallen through that thin crust.

Yet as poignant as the collapse of Kurtz may be, and while in some respects he may rank with Oedipus or King Lear as a tragic figure, it is nonetheless reasonable to ask why Marlow (or we) should care about either the sufferings or the insights of an individual who has committed what might well be termed crimes against humanity. Indeed, in the single most influential critical essay on the novella, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” (first delivered as a lecture in 1975), the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe takes issue precisely with the text’s uneven representation of Africa and Africans relative to Kurtz:

Africa as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril. Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind? (p. 12).

Imputing this emphasis to the fact that “Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist” (p. 11), Achebe adduces such scenes as the following, in which Marlow likens himself and the other white men to “wanderers on prehistoric earth” and the Africans to “prehistoric man”:

No, they [the Congolese] were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you—you so remote from the night of first ages—could comprehend (p. 76).

To some extent Achebe is right to identify Conrad’s outlook (which, it is true, is essentially in accord with Marlow’s when it comes to matters of race) as reproducing the prejudices characteristic of his historical era, and it is clear that this passage, in which Marlow affirms the “remote kinship” of his European listeners with Africans, is intended primarily as a spirited dare; that is, it is designed not to elevate the status of Africans but rather to lower that of Europeans. Yet while Achebe had intended his essay to relegate Heart of Darkness to the ash can of history by concluding that a text that thus “depersonalizes a portion of the human race” cannot constitute “a great work of art” (p. 12), it actually has had the opposite result by making readers all the more intrigued by Conrad’s book. Nonetheless, it served Achebe’s end in an important respect by transforming a work that had generally been viewed as progressively anti-imperialist and antiracist into one that now was suspected of being Eurocentric and racist.