The Savage Within

Heart of Darkness is often viewed as an allegory that relates the tragic demise of the colonists and the annihilation of the noble ideas they hold. In Heart of Darkness, the colonial theme is best examined through the fate of Kurtz, the protagonist of the novel who emerges from the surface of conventional European values as a man of varied talents and high culture. Equipped with moral ideas, Kurtz travelled to the Congo to campaign for noble ideals, yet having arrived in a primeval place, the uncivilised wilderness awakened his “brutal instincts” and “monstrous passion”. He submitted himself utterly to the temptation to “go native”, descending into a moral and physical state of degeneration. He is to become a savage man, consumed by the tangled and unforgiving jungle. The life and death of Kurtz in the wilderness helps to demonstrate that the treat of barbarism comes from indeed within civilisation itself. This paper thus seeks to examine the savage humanity by scrutinising Kurtz’s Mephistophelian transformation in the heart of darkness.