The reader finds out about Kurtz through Marlowe prying around and gleaning information from everyone he meets. Slo wly, Marlowe’s detective work reveals a very disturbing picture of an evil man. Kurtz appears to be a man with vision. He is driven. He is a man of substance, morality, and, most of all, of predictability. Marlow knows what he wants and goes after it. This is a comforting thought to the modern Marlowe, who is far more comfortable with the praxis, than the subjective, and whose world view offered an answer to everything.
What Marlowe found, however, was spontaneous and unpredictable. Kurtz’s story was not scripted by a Rational God, or a Theistic God. His story was scripted by a Naturalistic God. At the end of the book, Charlie finds Kurtz. Kurtz is very sick, and depressed. Marlow talks to a man who had been with Kurtz for a long time and he told Marlow what he knows. He told him that Kurtz was a monster. He was the most ruthless and remorseless of all the cannibals in the jungle. Kurtz started out with a clear mind but slowly became this ruthless monster. Kurtz began as a modern man, a scientific hero, a man who believed that knowledge could do everything. He went to an uncivilized land full of superstition and folklore. In other words, Kurtz was a “missionary†for “modernism†in a culture that was based on feelings and other abstractions. African society at this time, was prehistoric. Ironically, though, the pre-civilization African culture changed Kurtz’s sophisticated culture, not vice versa. Kurtz, a child of science, a child of modernity, had his life pulled from him when he realized science was not the way to find happiness and, to a large extent, it killed him.
“. . .supreme moment of complete knowledge . . . †The “knowledge†is the realization that science cannot fix the whole world. That is what drove Kurtz to become this monster. It was the “The horror! The horror!†(Peter Stobaugh)