<P> Kurtz is an ivory trader, sent by a shadowy Belgian company into the heart of an unnamed place in Africa (generally regarded as the Congo Free State). With the help of his superior technology, Kurtz has turned himself into a charismatic demigod of all the tribes surrounding his station, and gathered vast quantities of ivory in this way . As a result, his name is known throughout the region . Kurtz's general manager is envious of Kurtz, and plots his downfall . </P> <P> Kurtz's mother was half English, his father was half French and thus "All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz ." As the reader finds out at the end, Kurtz is a multitalented man--painter, musician, writer, promising politician . He starts out, years before the novel begins, as an imperialist in the best tradition of the "white man's burden". The reader is introduced to a painting of Kurtz's, depicting a blindfolded woman bearing a torch against a nearly black background, and clearly symbolic of his former views . Kurtz is also the author of a pamphlet regarding the civilization of the natives . The presence of his admirer, the Russian "Harlequin", and what he reveals about Kurtz in his adulatory descriptions of him raises questions about Kurtz's actual beliefs and the sincerity of his progressive views . </P> <P> However, over the course of his stay in Africa, Kurtz becomes corrupted . He takes his pamphlet and scribbles in, at the very end, the words "Exterminate all the brutes!" He induces the natives to worship him, setting up rituals and venerations worthy of a tyrant . By the time Marlow, the protagonist, sees Kurtz, he is ill with jungle fever and almost dead . Marlow seizes Kurtz and endeavors to take him back down the river in his steamboat . Kurtz dies on the boat with the last words, "The horror! The horror!" Kurtz ultimately was changed by the jungle . At first he wanted to bring civilization to the natives, as his painting shows, but in the end he changed to wanting to "exterminate all the brutes!" </P> <P> Kurtz's persona is generally understood to derive from the notoriously brutal history of the so - called "Congo Free State", which was later taken over by Belgium and became a Belgian colony in 1908 . In his history book King Leopold's Ghost, Adam Hochschild suggests that Léon Rom, an administrator in King Leopold's Congo, i.e. in the Congo Free State, was the principal inspiration for the Kurtz character, citing references as the heads on the stakes outside of the station and other similarities between the two . Hochschild and other authors have also suggested that the fate of the disastrous "rear column" of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition (1886 - 8) on the Congo may have also been an influence . Column leader Edmund Musgrave Barttelot, "went mad, began hitting, whipping, and killing people, and was finally murdered". Bloom notes that Kurtz's sophisticated brutality is closer to that of Barttelot's associate slave trader Tippu Tip . The expedition's overall leader, Henry Morton Stanley, the principal figure involved in preparing the Congo for Leopold's rule, may also have been an influence . </P>

How did kurtz die in the heart of darkness