What do Kurtz's last words (The horror! The horror!) mean in Heart of Darkness?

‘The horrer, the horrer’ is what the reporter groaned as he watched the Hindenburg and all the people aboard burn up. It’s been used as a saying in a few movies. Might that apply to the book?

@faye you bring up a good point, I did not even think of that.
Yet interestingly enough the Hindenburg disaster took place in 1937, while the book was published in 1902.

Yes, I was going to say, the book came first. Think of the title of the book Heart of Darkness, think of Kurtz’s experiences and think of Marlow’s opening line, “This too was one of the dark places of the earth.” What has Kurtz’s experience been and what is he seeing or saying about life at the end?

I wonder if the reporter had read the book and that stuck with him!

@faye Could well be.

Kurtz had been fleshed out as a character all through the movie. On the face of it, he was a whak job. But as the layers are peeled back, you can see that he is increasingly appalled at what the government that he has loved and served is asking him to do. It is a contradiction and he is sickened to his core at the, well, horror of it all. He makes oblique reference to it a couple of times in his conversations with Martin Sheen. By the time the assassin arrives, he has had enough and is ready to check out. He talks with him andI feel, tries to make himself understood. What he’s done, what he had to do, and his motivations. He has carried horror around with him not as a concept but as a tangible, weighted entity and knows that he can no longer be free of it. He knows this on a visceral level and accepts his death as a realease from his intimate aquaintance with horror.

@Trillian, Wow that was an amazing analysis, thank you.

@Trillian I’ve read the book and I think you’re right on the money.

Yes, @Trillian is spot on.
A recent novel with a very similar theme is Tree of Smoke, told from the point of view of one for whom the Kurtz-like character was a mentor.

Those words are among the most famous last words of any English novel. It pays to differentiate between the book and the movie, however.

In the film, the cues are visual; in the book, obviously verbal. @janbb has asked a perfect teacherish question. If you can think about and answer that in your own words, you will have learned something about both writing and reading, and the relationship of the author to his reader.

@faye I thought the reporter said “Oh, the humanity.” Did he say “The horror” as well? That footage was difficult to watch, I don’t want to do it again to check that, but it will probably drive me crazy if I don’t.

It’s also important to remember that the movie Apocolypse Now was based on Heart of Darkeness but is not a film of the novel. Both have colonialism as theme but very different time periods and treatments.

Who is this Kurtz, and what last words are you referring to? My favorite author is Katherine Kurtz, and there is no way she has uttered/written her last word.

Kurtz is the antagonist in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The movie, Apocalypse Now was an updated treatment of the themes in the novel.

I have the book, but have not read it.

As far as the movie goes, although artistically polysemous, to me “the horror” is not the bloody acts of killing or battle themselves – it’s the horror of hypocrisy and lies within the judgment.

Kurtz did not recognize the US government’s right to judge him, and by extension, nor Willard. He was judging himself in the end, and that is why he allowed himself to be killed. That was his horror: his self-judgment, his self-reckoning – his split humanity; our split humanity – not the acts of war.

The original print (that I saw anyway) had the closing credits rolling over jungle explosions, implying that they (“PBR Street Gang”) had successfully called in the planned airstrike (from “Almighty”). As far as I know that version has never been on DVD, and I have three different versions. This implies (to me) a cleansing.

Coppola removed those prints from circulation.

Perhaps he wanted the Catholic-esq Kurtz confession left flat (dissonant), vs. some kind of implied redemption (harmonious closure).

But then.., your question was about the book. Sorry.

@gailcalled Oh, thank you for that info

@faye The reporter said “Oh the humanity” and a bunch of other things, but he did not say “The horror, the horror” at any point. A transcript of his remarks is here.

Sorry, off and on memory, I guess. I would have said so on Jeopardy!

@ipso: Any day where I learn a new word is a particularly good day: Polysemous

@gailcalled :-)

The mention above of transcript makes me want to add this from the movie script:

”I’ve seen the horror; horrors that you’ve seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me; you have a right to do that, but you have no right to judge me. It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror: horror has a face, and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and mortal terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies.

I remember when I was with Special Forces – it seems a thousand centuries ago – we went into a camp to inoculate it. The children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us, and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile-a pile of little arms.

And I remember…I…I…, I cried. I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn’t know what I wanted to do – and I want to remember it, I never want to forget.

And then I realized – like I was shot – like I was shot with a diamond; a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought: “My God, the genius of that; the genius; the will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure.” And then I realized they could stand that. These were not monsters, these were men, trained cadres, these men who fought with their hearts, who have families, who have children, who are filled with love – that they had this strength, the strength to do that.

If I had ten divisions of those men, then our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral and at the same time were able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling, without passion, without judgment – without judgment. Because it’s judgment that defeats us.

I worry that my son might not understand what I’ve tried to be, and if I were to be killed, Willard, I would want someone to go to my home and tell my son everything, everything I did, everything you saw, because there’s nothing that I detest more than the stench of lies. And if you understand me, Willard, you… you will do this for me.”

@ipso: That’s while I generally prefer the book; this monologue is too wordy. And I am suspicious of those who say, “It is impossible for words to describe” and then attempt to do it.

Wrote about this a long time ago when majoring in English Lit, so my memory is a bit lacking. But I know that the meaning of those words must be considered in light of what Marlow tells Kurtz’s fiancee, The Intended, were Kurtz’s last words. He tells her that the last thing Kurtz spoke of was her. Previously in the book, Marlow has said something (that I see was also in the script of Apocalypse Now, according to ipso), that he hates lies more than anything on earth, he absolutely cannot abide them. So the question is, if he tells The Intended Kurtz’s last words were of her, what does that tell us about the words “the horror, the horror?” Do those words say something about her and what she represents in the story and in Kurtz’s life? Or did Marlow put aside his own aversion to lies for her benefit, just to console her?

The conclusion I seem to remember writing, and that I think was upheld in the lectures we heard, was that on a literal level he lied, but on a deeper level, he told the truth. “The horror” was all that the so-called civilized Europeans had wrought in what we now would call the third world, a world they thought themselves superior to and with which they should be able to do what they wished. They even thought they were doing indigenous peoples a favor in bringing them their idea of civilization, regardless of the costs. The Intended, all the other sheltered women and the whole of their society symbolized that civilized world of beautiful ideals that the colonizing men were supposedly protecting, upholding, and even conquering the world in the service of. “The horror” was also the license Kurtz had allowed himself in this other world he had come to as a colonialist, the god-like powers he had given himself and had encouraged the natives to attribute to him, and the barbaric practices he may have indulged in and/or allowed others to commit.

That’s about as far as my memory goes, hope a little was helpful. Sorry it is is several months after you asked, but it was one of my favorite books to read and to write about, so I couldn’t resist.

I think many respondents here have found much of the truth of the final comments that Mr Kurtz made in Conrad’s Novella. I think it is wrong to assume that Coppola inferred a different meaning in the movie to the book. The movie presents the comments in a more contemporary setting and Coppola may have also expanded or extrapolated their meaning. I do think though that Coppola did not intend to change the thrust of the words or their context, as Coppola obviously admired Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” too much to change the storie’s and the phrase’s context.
To my mind, considering the tragedy of the treatment of indigenous peoples then and still now, whether it be in Conrad’s Congo (in which he of course did pilot a steam boat) or Coppola’s Vietnam, the quite succinct meaning of the words themselves and in fact what the whole novella builds up to is this- Kurtz had seen the horror of the treatment of the natives, the absolute lack of compassion, the treatment of them as less than animals and he had particpated in this, only in an absolute and effective way for his meglomaniacal and oligarchal ends. Looking at this “horror” of treatment of fellow beings in the colonial world and not seeing any remorse either in his compatriots and colleagues, Kurtz had then looked inside himself as he was dying and failed to find any semblance or remnant of humanity in himself, only the darkness of his own soul. Extrapolating this interpretation of his fellow Europeans and then his own psyche in which he had failed to find any redeeming qualities, to the world and the human race in general, the universe then becomes a very dark place indeed, in which Kurtz finally realises with his last breaths is horrible in it’s complete bereftness of any true compassion or altruism, or for that matter any of the finer aspirations of humanity at all. The darkness of human nature and the universe is for him absolute and terrible in its finality- hence “the horror, the horror”.