Connection: Mr. Kurtz and the Wizard of Oz

"What can you expect!" he burst out; "he came to them with thunder and lightning, you know-and they had never seen anything like it - and very terrible. He could be very terrible. You can't judge Mr. Kurtz as you would an ordinary man. No, no, no! Now - just to give you an idea - I don't mind telling you, he wanted to shoot me too one day - but I don't judge him."

This description of Mr. Kurtz on page 56 immediately caused me to picture the giant, looming head of the Wizard of Oz, his relentless power and control. In the story, a girl named Dorothy and her motley bunch of friends including a animated scarecrow, tin man and lion, go on a quest for the Wizard, because they have heard from others that he has magical powers and can grant their wishes. They proceed to go on a difficult trek in order to find him, and once they do, they discover that he is actually an ordinary man who is very manipulative and frail.

It's easy to see that if you swap Dorothy for Marlow and set the scene in Africa, it's almost exactly the same story. The natives (like the Munchkins) saw their idols as all-knowing and deserving of worship, because they had been charmed through their respective special talents. Since Heart of Darkness was written just a year before the Wizard of Oz, it almost seems as if the story is alluding to to novel.

This realization lead me to realize how disappointed I really was with Mr. Kurtz. Like Dorothy and Marlow, I though he would be this incredible guy with amazing insight and intelligence, but from the book, I really did not get that feeling at all. I felt like there was not enough textual evidence to convince me of his awesomeness, and that really lowered my view of the book. This made me to connect more with Dorothy, because she actually saw that the Wizard was this pathetic little man, while Marlow still thought of Mr. Kurtz as amazing. I thought, as the reader and not being Marlow, I did not truly get a feel of why he was so great. (This could also be because there was some evidence, but it was so deeply entrenched with ridiculous amounts of extraneous detail and hyphens that I could not find it.)