I felt that the company didn’t perceive Kurtz as an equal human being given his “transformations” from living on the African continent. They feel he is some sort of hybrid between the indigenous “savages” and them, no longer a concrete human being. This image is redoubled when we meet Kurtz and he is dehumanized by his sickness, forced to crawl around on 4 legs and can barely speak. Marlow treats him as an infirm, inferior to him. However, despite the fact that Marlow seems to hate Kurtz and feels betrayed by his past conception and by Kurtz’s “unsound” methods of educating and imposing colonization upon the natives, he takes his side when Kurtz is finally confronted by the company’s manager, who finds Kurtz unfit for his duty, based on his “unique” way of governing. Marlow feels disgust and has to choose between two wrongs: supporting the brutal, heartless Kurtz or supporting the hypocritical manager.
In my opinion, Marlow chose to stay with Kurtz because he believed it was the managers fault that Kurtz became the way he became. The managers naïveté, and his unwillingness to see the ineffectiveness or cruelty of his colonizing methods was far worse than Kurtz simply trying to complete the mission he set out to complete by any means. Kurtz is more enlightened than the manager, and has some of conception of Africa, since he has been so changed by it. It is evident that he realizes the stupidity and madness of any attempt to colonize Africa when he claims “the horror! The horror!” right before he dies. For me, this means that Kurtz understands to what point it is impossible to continue to hope that one day Europeans will manage to tame the “wild” Africa. Perhaps it’s the horror at his own futility, or the horror at the naivete of his commanders in Europe, I don’t know for sure.
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