Colonialism and Imperialism - European Ideals in Heart of Darkness and

dig outness of European Ideals Exposed in Heart of Darkness and The apprehend Men Kurtz occupies a peculiar position in Conrads Heart of Darkness and T.S. Eliots The Hollow Men. Mr. Kurtz, he dead is the epigraph to The Hollow Men. Eliot draws an obvious allusion to Kurtz, the honorablely hollow cosmos in Heart of Darkness. Left to his own devices, Kurtz commits appalling acts such as shrinking human heads and performing terrible sacrifices. Kurtz is armed with that the dubious spirit of moral superiority of his culture and the desire to civilize the natives (Dahl 34). This front quickly crumbles when faced with the noble yet savage ways offered by Africa. The crumbling front only leaves a hollow void of desired ideas and morals. This hollowness is what Eliot builds on to develop his own idea of hollowness. Kurtz is an apt example of the hollowness of European ideals that Eliot wanted to expose. T.S. Eliots The Hollow Men uses Conrads Kurtz to enforce the idea of hollowness f ound in contemporary Western thought, because Kurtz is a model European and represents the ideas of the modern Western Everyman. Kurtz is a first European thinker and citizen. He is the product of idealistic, progressive, and optimistic thought (Dahl 34). Kurtz is a Renaissance man, being a musician, a painter, a journalist, and a universal temperament (71). So swell up does Kurtz perform all his duties, Marlow never figures out Kurtzs true occupation. Marlow can envision Kurtz as a painter who wrote for the papers as well as a journalist who could paint (71). Kurtzs universal talent extends to the field of politics, where he could have been a splendid leader of an extreme party, in fact of any party (71). Kurtz was highly respected... ...rmany and later in Vietnam and Cambodia (Anderson 404). In all likelihood, Heart of Darkness was just a prelude to the atrocities that could be committed with the continuation of European thought as it was. Eliot explicitly says one of the t hemes to Part V is the present decay of Eastern Europe (Roessel 55). Eliot built on this theme of moral hollowness in The Hollow Men, by having Kurtz and his actions be representative of contemporary European thought. Works Cited Anderson, Walter E. Heart of Darkness The Sublime Spectacle. University of Toronto Quarterly 57(3) (1998) 404-421. Dahl, James C. Kurtz, Marlow, Conrad and the sympathetic Heart of Darkness. Studies in the Literary Imagination 1(2) (1968) 33-40. Roessel, David. Guy Fawkes Day and the Versailles Peace in The Hollow Men. English Language Notes 28(1) (1990) 52-58.