The 'Horror' in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness

In his novella, Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad tells a two-dimensional tale of an expedition into the "heart" of the Congo River, paralleled by a trip he takes within himself. His intimate description of the setting sets the stage for his "journey within," and his imagery through the setting seems to foreshadow his ultimate realization: the horror.

Marlow is the main character, the man taking the trip. The "horror" that Marlow finds in a hut in Africa along the river epitomizes his self-discovery. He undertakes his journey because he was "tired of resting." He wanted to do something, to have an experience, to gain some kind of enlightenment. He does.

His mind is clear when he gets on the water and starts floating into archaic lands, undertaking the dangerous endeavor "with less thought than most men give to the crossing of a street" (Conrad 16). The river is dense and dark, undergrowth overtaking the river, protruding into the ship and into Marlow's thoughts, maybe even into his soul. The wild and uncivilized world takes shape.

The further "inside" the river he travels, the more evil and despicable the life and people he sees become. They are savage and brutal, raw, like beasts. He can't believe it. It terrifies him, disgusts him. How indecent! But he continues on. He wants enlightenment, and he wants to find Kurtz, an almost God-like figure of intelligence and knowing who awaits him at the "heart," in the "inner" station of an ivory operation.

Kurtz has been in the Congo for some time. His legend is legendary; he is known as a sort of fountain of knowledge and wisdom. But Kurtz is in the deepest, darkest point of the river. Marlow must press on, further into the beastly, untamed, animal world of these people. Marlow expects, I guess, just a "talk" with Kurtz, a source of enlightenment. When he reaches Kurtz, however, he discovers, maybe what he by then feared, that Kurtz is mad, no different, worse than the savages, corrupted, overtaken by the evil of the Congo. His "humanity" and moral ground are gone. How could this be?

He learns what man and therefore he is without rules, without society, what man can be in the wild, what exists in all of us, himself. He reaches the inner-station, and also the innermost part of himself, and finds Kurtz: he finds evil. He says of Kurtz, "the bewildering, the illuminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness" (48). Kurtz is ghastly, almost death itself, with "his ribs all astir, the bones of his arm waving" (Conrad 64). Through Kurtz, Marlow sees what he is outside of all "human" notions, without his so-called humanity, without his morals, his ideas, his ideals, and so on. He is a beast, capable of anything, including death.
This "horror" that he discovers hits him like a lightning bolt. He realizes how raw, how brutal, and how brittle life really is. He sees life from a different perspective, from the very bottom, from the inside, and he sees his "inextinguishable regrets," or a life spent misinformed about himself.

He returns to the tamed world of civilized people with his new truth, seeing societal life as nothing more than "to filch a little money from each other…to dream their insignificant and silly dreams" (Conrad 70). Dreams and desires are no longer real. None of it is. Nothing is. "I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty restraining myself from laughing in their faces so full of stupid importance" (Conrad 70). He believes that "the most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself that comes too late-a crop of inextinguishable regrets" (Conrad 69). Marlow discovered himself, and he discovered nothing at the same time, and is then forced to relive it in "every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender" (Conrad 68).