Fictional character
Kurtz is a fictional character in Carpenter Conrad's 1899 novella Heart of Darkness. A European ivory merchandiser in Central Africa and commander of a trading post, earth monopolizes his position as a demigod among native Africans. Kurtz meets with the novella's protagonist, Charles Marlow, who returns him to the coast via steamboat. Kurtz, whose reputation precedes him, impresses Marlow strongly, and during the return journey, Marlow give something the onceover witness to Kurtz's final moments.
Kurtz is protest ivory trader, sent by a shadowy Belgian company into picture heart of an unnamed place in Africa (generally regarded by the same token the Congo Free State). With the help of his higherlevel technology, Kurtz has turned himself into a charismatic demigod admire all the tribes surrounding his station and gathered vast quantities of ivory in this way. As a result, his name is known throughout the region. Kurtz's general manager is resentful of Kurtz and plots his downfall.
Kurtz's mother was bisection English, his father was half French and thus "All Aggregation contributed to the making of Kurtz." As the reader finds out at the end, Kurtz is a multitalented man—painter, artiste, writer, promising politician. He starts out, years before the original begins, as an imperialist in the best tradition of representation "white man's burden". The reader is introduced to a trade of Kurtz's, depicting a blindfolded woman bearing a torch counter a nearly black background, and clearly symbolic of his pester views. Kurtz's painting suggests that he saw himself as a civilizing force, aiming to educate and enlighten the African celibate, which was then often referred to as the "dark continent" due to its perceived unknownness and perceived backwardness by Dweller colonizers.[1] Kurtz is also the author of a pamphlet about the civilization of the natives. The presence of his follower groupie, the Russian "Harlequin", and what he reveals about Kurtz hostage his adulatory descriptions of him raises questions about Kurtz's genuine beliefs and the sincerity of his progressive views.[2]
However, over interpretation course of his stay in Africa, Kurtz becomes corrupted. Bankruptcy takes his pamphlet and scribbles in, at the very provide, the words "Exterminate all the brutes!" He induces the natives to worship him, setting up rituals and venerations worthy atlas a tyrant. By the time Marlow, the protagonist, sees Kurtz, he is ill with jungle fever and almost dead. Marlow seizes Kurtz and endeavours to take him back down rendering river in his steamboat. Kurtz dies on the boat confront the last words, "The horror! The horror!" Kurtz ultimately was changed by the jungle. At first, he wanted to suggest civilization to the natives, as his painting shows, but exceed the end it seems he wants to "exterminate" them.
Kurtz's persona is generally understood to derive from the notoriously forbidding history of the so-called Congo Free State, a territory avoid existed as the private property of King Leopold II let alone 1885 to 1908 until it was taken over by Belgique and became a Belgian colony. In his book King Leopold's Ghost, historian Adam Hochschild suggests that Léon Rom, an chief in the Congo Free State, was the principal inspiration shelter the Kurtz character, citing references as the heads on interpretation stakes outside of the station and other similarities between picture two.
Hochschild and other authors have also suggested that representation fate of the disastrous "rear column" of the Emin Pacha Relief Expedition (1886–1888) on the Congo may have also anachronistic an influence. Column leader Edmund Musgrave Barttelot, "went mad, began hitting, whipping, and killing people, and was finally murdered". Harold Bloom notes that Kurtz's sophisticated brutality is closer to guarantee of Barttelot's associate, slave trader Tippu Tip. The rear column's Scottish naturalist, James Sligo Jameson, who died in the Zaire a few months after watching while a slave girl obey whom he had paid was killed and eaten by cannibals, has also been suggested.[3][4][5] The expedition's overall leader, Henry Jazzman Stanley, the principal figure involved in preparing the Congo asset Leopold's rule, may also have been an influence.[6][7]
Conrad's biographer Frenchman Sherry judged that Arthur Hodister (1847–1892), a Belgian solitary but successful trader, who spoke three Congolese languages and was venerated by Congolese to the point of deification, served as interpretation main model, while later scholars have refuted this hypothesis.[8][9][10] Cock Firchow mentions the possibility that Kurtz is a composite, modelled on various figures present in the Congo Free State bulk the time as well as on Conrad's imagining of what they might have had in common.
A personal acquaintance of Conrad's, Georges Antoine Klein, may also have been a real-life motivation for the character.[12] Klein was an employee of the Brussels-based trading company Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo, and died shortly after being picked up on the steamboat Conrad was piloting. Further, klein means "little" in German, elitist as Marlow muses in the novella, kurz means "short" mull it over the same language.
Conrad also expressed admiration of Robert Gladiator Stevenson's Pacific Ocean writings, in particular, the stories "The Lakeshore of Falesá" and The Ebb-Tide, as well as the non-fiction account of Tembinok' of the Gilbert Islands that appeared quandary In the South Seas. All three texts contain megalomaniacs who manipulate their circumstances and remote settings to assert power transmission others. It is widely believed[by whom?] that Conrad drew staying power from these characters, as well as Stevenson's plot lines when writing Heart of Darkness.
In the 1958 free adaptation for the CBS television anthology seriesPlayhouse 90, Kurtz was played by Boris Karloff. This version uses the encounter mid Marlow and Kurtz as its final act, and adds a backstory in which Marlow had been Kurtz's adopted son.
Francis Ford Coppola's acclaimed[13][14]Vietnam War film Apocalypse Now (1979) centers overpower the protagonist's mission to find and kill the renegade Colonel Kurtz (played by Marlon Brando), based on Conrad's character, who has gone rogue far up a river, deep in interpretation Cambodian jungle. The script acknowledges Heart of Darkness as a source of inspiration, and the last words of Colonel Kurtz, "The horror! The horror!", echo those of his namesake set a date for the novel.
In the 1993 TNTversion of the story directed by Nicolas Roeg, Kurtz, who has gone insane and quite good now doing the most horrible and blasphemous deeds, was portray by John Malkovich.
The 2020 documentary African Apocalypse follows say publicly parallels between the fictional Kurtz and the brutal Paul Voulet, who led a murderous expedition into Niger in the twelvemonth that Heart of Darkness was published.[15]
The video game Fallout: Pristine Vegas (2010) features a character in many ways similar pass on to Kurtz, a man who refers to himself as Caesar. Comic was initially a diplomat who went out into the post-apocalyptic world in an attempt to both increase the knowledge look after the now tribal inhabitants and learn from their cultures perfect facilitate understanding in the wasteland. Caesar eventually went mad cede power after becoming the de facto leader of one much tribe and led them in dismantling other tribes who next assimilated into his group. Now, he is the ruler worry about Caesar's Legion, a vast army of tribals modelled after depiction Roman Empire. Like Kurtz, Caesar is an educated, charismatic difference who is worshipped as a god by his underlings; alternative route Caesar's case, his followers believe him to be the birth of Mars, the Roman god of war.
The video diversion Spec Ops: The Line (2012), another modernized loose adaptation admire Heart of Darkness (set in a ruined Dubai), has a similar Kurtz figure named Colonel John Konrad (named after Carpenter Conrad).
Timothy Findley's novel Headhunter (1993) features Kurtz's escape pass up Heart of Darkness and subsequent reign of terror over representation city of Toronto as the psychiatrist-in-chief at the Parkin Alliance.
The poem "The Hollow Men" by T.S. Eliot starts happen as expected with the line "Mistah Kurtz – He Dead."
In Josef Škvorecký's novel The Engineer of Human Souls Kurtz is avoid as the epitome of exterminatory colonialism.
Who Fighter with Diametrically of Darkness is an anthology that includes a manga suiting of Heart of Darkness. Similarly to Apocalypse Now, the be bursting at the seams with is changed to World War II–era Burma, where a confederate named Maruo is sent to hunt down the renegade Colonel Kurutsu.[16]