Kurtz – A product of colonial Evil and Darkness in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of darkness.
Thou Blind Fool Love What dost thou to mine eyes,
That they behold,and see not what they see.
Love in its varied and spectacular forms functions a fundamental role to orient a human being in a particular direction. It can play either a formative or destructive role in any individual awakening him to the hidden possibilities of his sense of being. Inspired by his love for the dark lady ,Shakespeare evolved himself into multifaceted personality with a grand sense of existence. His thoughts were disturbed and reshaped by the sensitive touch of love for the dark beauty.
A tacit love for evil and darkness ,a key element in Heart of Darkness manifested itself extensively in the character of Mr. Kurtz. Kurtz is an embodiment of evil and darkness. During his arrogant ruling over the innocent natives his devilish desire grew out of control. A representative of European values, Kurtz who during his initial settlement in the dark continent wanted to civilize the African native but  died as a man believing that the company should “exterminate all the brutes”.
Evil and Dark are the recurrent element in our life. We are wittingly or unwittingly involved in such kind of things at some point of our life. They are an inseparable part of our life. So the more we know about this ,the better we shall be able to deal with the negative forces in our nature.
Everyone has an evil side. However the magnitude of darkness of evil and darkness may vary from time to time and person to person. But what matters more is whether we act on it or not. We need to have control over our self. only then we can evolve into a better human being. All the rituals and moral preaching and religious scriptures are only there to control this evil inside of our nature.
One main theme of Conrad in Heart of Darkness is colonialism and its bearings on whites and non-whites. Through his narrator (i.e. Marlow) Conrad mentions the roman conquest and thereby establishes the truth that colonialism existed since the dawn of civilization. In the Novel Kurtz a prime Character, extremely hungry for power and position, colonizes the interior part of Congo. He dominates them physically, economically and even sexually. At the beginning he justifies his deeds saying that he is bringing light in the lives of savages but he himself is gradually overshadowed by the dark forces of our innate primitive nature.
We can see the adverse effect of the so called civilizing mission, the ‘white man’s burden’ to bring light into the darkest part of Africa. Kurtz, the excellent and reputed agent of the company as well as Europe, can not lead his moral self to a pre destined location and in course of time he starts losing his much required individual and agent –like moral strength. He became a colonized person under the dark devilish colonizer who is none but his primitive nature. His colonized self is imprisoned in an atmosphere of freewheeling subconscious self.
According to Conrad however civilized we might be,a primitive savage self is hidden within us. If we don’t act according to the virtue of moral restraint, this primitive demon awakens from its slumber and renders our life brutal and consequently hollow.
Behind the mask of a sense of superiority , progressive minded cultured person one can bear a sense of darkness and evil to dominate and subjugate and curb the freedom of an individual or a race in every sphere of life. Even the sense of being of the subjugated is crushed . he may start treating himself inferior because he has already lost his self respect and importance in the sphere of his life. Thus the process of colonizing the geographical location as well as the mind of the Man becomes complete.
Kurtz arrived at the central station to perform his duty as an agent as well as missionary Man willing to upgrade the lives of the natives. He came with an awareness of a sense of unflinching and unwavering loyalty to a standard of norms. But the temptation of being a trade genius and agent extraordinary as well as ruler of the natives made him deviated from the standard of civilized ethical norms. Instead of keeping firm control over his innate and hidden dark force Kurtz went on yielding to the temptation. That is why Kurtz became an incarnation of brutality and barbarism .
So the conversion of Kurtz takes place in an unexpected way. An  intelligent agent of the company  Kurtz once wrote a pamphlet stating the formative role of the whites that they can play over the savage native. He had a very high and progressive concept about taming the cannibals. At the end of the novel we see him giving a written advice to the company to exterminate all the brutes.
His association with the savage transformed him into a savage. Kurtz, who is an ideal colonizer because he keeps the trade flowing and
seems to advocate instructing the natives, is a failure, and his
Representation as a savage greedy colonizer is a subversion of European
Colonialism in Heart of Darkness. His brutality can be seen in the part
in which Marlow sees the sunken heads on poles at Kurtz’s station.
Marlow says that “they would have been even more impressive, those
heads on the stakes, if their faces had not been turned to the house”.
Kurtz had probably turned their faces to the house to be seen by the
natives so that the natives would recognize his power. Then the
manager told Marlow that “Kurtz’s methods had ruined the district” and
here was nothing exactly profitable in these heads being there. They
only showed that Mr. Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his
various lusts, that there was something wanting in him - some small
matter which, when the pressing need arose, could not be found under
his magnificent eloquence.
Heart of Darkness is a text which subverts colonialism into evil and darkness
through not only its representations of the colonizcd but even its
representations of the colonizer. The fact that colonialism destroys not
only the natives but also the colonizer can be best seen through the
representation of Kurtz, who is represented as the “universal genius adored by the primitive man; but then, he turns out to be a devil instead
of a god. Kurtz is more savage than his adorers. Marlow is informed
about what Kurtz’s arrival there: “he came to them with thunder and
lightning”,“two shot-guns, a heavy rifle, and a light revolver carbine”.
 At the Inner Station, this armful of guns is enough to make
Kurtz a god. In this position Kurtz discovers “things about himself
which he did not know [...] till he took counsel with his great
solitude”. What he did not know was his capacity for the greed, lust,
blood-thirst, and vain glory symbolized by his ivory, his mistress, the
heads he puts on stakes, and the ceremonies at which he presided.
When the wilderness whispered these things to him, the whisper
“echoed loudly within him because he was hallow at the core”.
The story of the moral disintegration of Kurtz, “our white
man in the tropics” to whose making “all Europe contributed” was
subversion enough. Kurtz is the character, through whom Conrad
underscores the reality about colonialism because Kurtz’s aim to
civilize and bring light to dark places is antithetical to his desire to
“exterminate all the brutes!” expressed in his seventeen-page report to
the Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs. In the end, Kurtz
fails, and his defeat by the wilderness is marked by his cry: “The
horror! The horror!” This is the last and incomprehensible whisper
of a man who had once lofty ideals. This is also the failure of Kurtz to
dominate the wilderness within him. In Kurtz we see that “the ideals
and ennobling principles turn out to be dangerous illusions, and that his
Representativeness dismantles the myth of empire”. The day after
Kurtz dies, Marlow sees that “the pilgrims buried something in a muddy hole”. Thus Marlow’s journey in Heart of Darkness, the aim of
which was to pursue a moral and ontological inquiry into human
history, turns out to be a journey at the end of which Marlow discovers
the self- deluding Endeavour of a human community. Marlow’s
journey shows the process of corruption and change, and moral
degeneracy. Finally, it can be said that in Heart of Darkness violence
pervades every aspect of the relationship between the colonizer and the
native; then it subverts the image of colonialism pervasive in the 19th century.