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Kurtz : The torch-bearer for white civilization
In the first company station, Marlow notices a picture painted by the remarkable Mr.Kurtz about a year ago. It represents ‘a woman, draped and blindfolded, carrying a lighted torch. The background was sombre---- almost black. The movement of the woman was stately, and the effect of the torchlight on the face was sinister .’Stately and sinister, these are the two unanalytical words in Marlow's descriptive. Kurtz’s position in Africa is stately, and at the same time, his actions and motives are sinister. Was it not while painting the picture that Kurtz began, as Marlow might phrase it, to feel his nerves go wrong--- to feel the attraction and the necessity of exacting from the natives' human sacrifice to himself as a God? At any rate, it was not long after he finished the painting that the natives began to adore him ritually, while he is hatred for them lunged to the depth out of which game is prescription of the only method for dealing with primitive people: ‘Exterminate all the brutes.’ The painting gives us a warning that what appears to be bright and white made turn out to be dark or black in many different senses; that what seems holy and sacred me proved to be idolatrous and even diabolical; that what is clothed may be stripped. Kurtz represents the European parasites in Africa, who are hollow, and who have no personal moral vision of their inhumanity and folly; but they are also collapsible because they have nothing ‘ behind them---- in their societies institutions---- to hold them up. When Kurtz’s diabolism is revealed to Marlow, he says, ‘Kurtz head kicked himself loose of the earth--- and I before him did not know whether I stood on the ground are allotted in the air.’