In the end of the novella when Kurtz is dying his last words are “The Horror! The Horror!” (305). This is both an affirmation and a moral victory for Kurtz before death. An affirmation is the act of affirming something or being affirmed. In other words it’s coming to a realization about the truth of an act or saying. A moral victory is a defeat that can be taken or seen as a victory on the terms of their morality. As Kurtz is about to die he sees all that he has done in the congo to others. “To speak plainly, he raided the country,’ I said. He nodded. ‘Not alone, surely!’ He muttered something about the villages round that lake. ‘Kurtz got the tribe to follow him,did he?’ I suggested. He fidgeted a little. ‘they adored him,’ he said.” (Marlow …show more content…
Because he had seen all that he had done and realised the horrible and awful things that went on in that jungle he came to an affirmation. Then he realised that he was the one that had done these things to people. This is where his morality comes in. At the beginning of the story it says that he had come to serve a great purpose and that he was there for the idea of helping people. That he would be the best one to help colonize and develop the natives. His morality was that of he wanted to actually help these people and teach them and civilize them. Yet the longer he stayed in the congo the more it changed him. The biggest evidence of this is his report for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs. “He began with the argument that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, ‘must necessarily appear to them savages in the nature of supernatural beings- we approach them with the might as of a deity,’ and so on, and so on. ‘By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded, etc etc.” (290). He had such a hope for them and after being there for a while the report suddenly ended with, “Exterminate all the brutes!” The congo had changed him as a man into something that would have been considered a monster. However, at the end of his life after his affirmation he has a moral victory because he admits to himself that he was the horror of that …show more content…
Marlow even says after his death, “ If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be. I was within humiliation that probably I would have nothing to say. This is the reason why I affirm that Kurtz was a remarkable man. He had something to say. He said it. Since I had peeped over the edge myself, I understand better the meaning of his stare, that could not see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness. He had summed up--he had judged. ‘The horror!’ He was a remarkable man.” (Marlow 305). Even though Kurtz had done all of those terrible things to people in the congo thinking it was for the greater good, in the end he realised his mistake and actually admitted that he was indeed ‘The horror!’. Which is more than most would be able to say and that is why Marlow describes his final words “The horror! The horror!” as both an affirmation and a moral