Heart Of Darkness Kurtz Deception Analysis

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a tale that brushes on the colonial era: it focuses mainly on the inhuman treatment of slaves and the blind ignorance that colonists hid behind to excuse their actions. And within these themes, there are several instances of deception running through the book. While the acts of deception themselves are of varying degrees and spread over a wide range of manners, they all seem to come from the same origin: self-betterment. Every single example of cheating within Heart of Darkness is based on one individual or one country or one race swindling another in order to profit from it themselves. All in all, it is nothing more than a mere reflection of mankind’s reality: the need, and drive, to take from another for one’s own progress without any regard of one’s actions’ repercussions. And this portrayal of man is exactly what Heart of Darkness strives to stand for.

While there are indeed several examples of fraud within Heart of Darkness, perhaps the most prominent is that of Kurtz. His portrayal throughout the book is one of constant change; the

The savages perceive Kurtz to be some sort of god, because he possesses guns; their belief comes not so much from an awe of Kurtz as from a lack of direct contact with colonist forces. Kurtz, their mediary, and in their eyes their ruler, conveniently manages it to hide this truth from them. He does so for the simple reason that he wishes to keep the power his positon entails. He doesn’t wish to protect the natives from colonialism; quite on the contrary he abuses the reaches of his power treating the natives in a manner much more inhuman than most colonialists would choose. But keeping the natives in the dark allows him access to a lot more power than would have been made available to him were he to conform to colonist regulations, and that ambition of bettering his own position is what fuels Kurtz’s