Man in Nothingness

In part two of Heart of Darkness, a constant theme is shown: Nature. As I read, I kept having flashbacks of reading The Stranger. Mersault was convinced the problems people had were meaningless. The world wouldn’t stop going because of our problems. Life goes on. This is similar to what I’ve seen in Heart of Darkness. Marlow criticizes Kurtz and everyone who glorifies him because he isn’t as important as everyone thinks he is. He criticizes him in a very subtle way: comparing him to nature. Just like Mersault, from The Stranger, Marlow knows there is nothing or no one as big and important as nature. One shouldn’t glorify or blow up something to those dimensions.

Ever since the first time Marlow heard about Kurtz, he was conscious that people idolized him. Even the natives whom he had conquered glorified him. He had vast amounts of Ivory, which made people admire him even more. However for Marlow, he was just a voice (pg.86).

Everyone thinks he is such an important person and he is so big except for Marlow. Mersault would have probably seen him like another person who would eventually die. The key point when I realized how Marlow, unlike the other characters, sees Kurtz as just any other man is when he dies. Unlike the others who wanted to keep the body, Marlow just throws him into the river. At this moment we know he doesn’t see him as a greater creature or as if the world would stop just because he had died.

“The current snatched him as though he had been a wisp of grass…” (pg. 94)

The fact that Marlow compared him to a wisp of grass shows he was meaningless compared to the earth. This also shows how similar Marlow and Mersault are. Neither gives anyone so much importance. After you are dead nothing matters and  all your life’s efforts are lost. After you are dead, the only thing that will keep you alive will be the memory of others, which is very biased. After you are dead the world will continue its course.

“Everything belonged to him- but that was a trifle. The thing was to know what he belonged to…” (pg.89)