ABSTRACT
Marlowe's journey down the Congo in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness becomes a metaphorical exploration into the lower depths of man's depravity, his capacity for rapacious exploitation. The wilderness is an objective correlative for an encroaching and atavistic savagery; it is "invisible" to Kurtz in the epigraph above because, having fought it on its own terms, it is now within him. By the time Marlowe encounters him crawling through the bush, Kurtz has abandoned his civilized morality-a concept the novel deals with ironically-and reverted to a primal condition, indulging his most base and destructive instincts in order to survive and even profit. With his dying breath, Kurtz acknowledges "the horror" at seeing what he truly is.
