Isolation In Heart Of Darkness

Isolation is terrifying. The idea that not one single other person in the world can understand or connect with you is one of the most depressing and discouraging thoughts to cross the human mind. Yet as the world of the thinker is slowly reduced in size, this thought becomes more and more of a possibility, more and more tangible, until suddenly the thinker is truly alone. By this point the thinker has explored the darkest reaches of their soul, and usually found something. Sometimes it is enlightenment, others it is madness. In Heart of Darkness all characters are somewhat isolated due to their situations as explorers, but the two main characters Marlow and Kurtz react differently than the rest and differently than each other. Marlow seems
This is the effect of the wilderness. The feeling of being so far from civilization is described by Marlow as a, “general sense of vague and oppressive wonder [which] grew upon [Marlow]… It was like a weary pilgrimage amongst hints of nightmares” (p. 23). This sense of nightmarish and hellish quality appears frequently in Marlow’s descriptions, further augmenting the sense of despair and hopelessness. As Marlow descends further into the jungle it becomes increasingly clear how the relative isolation is affecting him. Marlow’s personifies the wilderness more and more as he becomes immersed in it. By the time he is at the station Marlow says that the wilderness, “seems to beckon with a… treacherous appeal to the lurking death, to the hidden evil, to the profound darkness of its heart” (p. 59). It is only the insanity of Kurtz that causes Marlow to pull back from the edge of going
According to Marlow, “ [The wilderness] had taken [Kurtz], loved him, embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed his soul to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation” (p. 89). Kurtz went out into the wilderness with noble intentions and high ideals, yet his time among so many who did not understand him, yet thought of him as a god, created in Kurtz a seeming god complex. By the time Marlow encounters him, Kurtz views himself as a seeming deity, and yet Marlow understands this because he himself was close to the edge. To Marlow, “[Kurtz’s] intelligence was perfectly clear… but his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness it had looked into itself, and, by heavens! I tell you it had gone mad” (p. 124-125). The isolation of being completely alone in a place as foreign as the heart of the Congo had taken Kurtz and pushed him beyond the limits of his character, forcing him to go insane in order to survive, a fate which Marlow narrowly