"He will be a somebody in the Administration before long. They, above - the Council in Europe, you know - mean him to be."" (p. 30). ""He is a prodigy," he said at last. "He is an emissary of pity and science and progress, and devil knows what else."" (p. 41). Kurtz is respected in the outer world; he was specially recommended for his position. Kurtz is described glowingly by all who know him, and that paints the picture of a genius, the personification of a civilized man. .
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Slowly, a few hints are revealed about Kurtz. "The "scoundrel" had reported that the "man" had been very ill - had recovered imperfectly." (p. 53). A few hints about his character are also revealed. "The dugout, four paddling savages, and the lone white man turning his back suddenly on the headquarters, on relief, on thoughts of home - perhaps; setting his face towards the depths of the wilderness, towards his empty and desolate station." (p. 53). Kurtz seems to be a man of strong beliefs, yet he is living in a place where those things don't matter, and it is extremely difficult to hold on to ones beliefs.
Kurtz saw himself as superior to the Africans. His hunger for power led to his imperialism over those whom he considered lower than himself. "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." (p. 84). He felt he had the power to do whatever he wanted in that place, whether or not it was moral. "He declared he would shoot me unless I gave him the ivory and then cleared out of the country, because he could do so, and had a fancy for it, and there was nothing on earth to prevent him killing whom he jolly well pleased." (p. 95). Kurtz may have been a civilized and brilliant man outside the jungle, but once descended into savagery, all his enlightenment turned into evil.
