"The horror!"

Upon my first reading of Heart of Darkness a few semesters ago for a literature class, I was shocked at some of the graphic things Conrad writes about. Specifically, I remember the severed heads that were on the fence being a striking image to me. Learning this time that Heart of Darkness was written loosely based on Conrad’s own experiences in the Congo amazed me. I never had given thought about what that part of the world was like whereas Conrad knew he wanted to visit there from the time he was a child.

I think it is interesting to see the comparisons of Conrad’s experience and the things he wrote about. Though we do not know much about Klein, the actual man Conrad was sent to pick up, we can make assumptions that Conrad disagrees with him greatly because of the way he describes Kurtz. Kurtz, who at the beginning I expected to be a Gatsby character (everyone knows his name, but no one knows him), turns out to be somewhat of a vicious dictator of the people around him and spends time killing many in search of ivory. Conrad writing this character so brutally cannot mean that he found Klein favorable.

I also think that one must take into consideration how Conrad falling ill on this trip could have altered his experience. If he had a high fever this could account for nightmares he might have had, and he was also in an unfamiliar place. I think the most poignant part of the story is Kurtz’s last words. “The horror! The horror!” Conrad could be using this as a way to describe his experience, how horrible this place was for him, how traumatizing. Also, the fact that he lies to Kurtz’s fiancée about his last words. He will not admit the horrors or how they affected them.

This leaves me to wonder, did Conrad write Heart of Darkness to finally get a little bit of what he saw off his chest? Is he trying to work through the trama?