Kurtz (Heart of Darkness)

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).

Kurtz's persona is generally understood to derive from the notoriously brutal history of the so-called Congo Free State, a territory that existed as the private property of King Leopold II from 1885 to 1908 until it was taken over by Belgium and became a Belgian colony.

In his book King Leopold's Ghost, historian Adam Hochschild suggests that Léon Rom, an administrator 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.

The rear column's Scottish naturalist, James Sligo Jameson, who died in the Congo a few months after watching while a slave girl for whom he had paid was killed and eaten by cannibals, has also been suggested.

[8][9][10] Peter Firchow mentions the possibility that Kurtz is a composite, modelled on various figures present in the Congo Free State at the time as well as on Conrad's imagining of what they might have had in common.

[12] Klein was an employee of the Brussels-based trading company Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo, and died shortly after being picked up on the steamboat Conrad was piloting.

Conrad also expressed admiration of Robert Louis Stevenson's Pacific Ocean writings, in particular, the stories "The Beach of Falesá" and The Ebb-Tide, as well as the non-fiction account of Tembinok' of the Gilbert Islands that appeared in In the South Seas.

Francis Ford Coppola's acclaimed[13][14] Vietnam War film Apocalypse Now (1979) centers on the protagonist's mission to find and kill the renegade Colonel Kurtz (played by Marlon Brando), based on Conrad's character, who has gone rogue far up a river, deep in the Cambodian jungle.

The 2020 documentary African Apocalypse follows the parallels between the fictional Kurtz and the brutal Paul Voulet, who led a murderous expedition into Niger in the year that Heart of Darkness was published.

Caesar was initially a diplomat who went out into the post-apocalyptic world in an attempt to both increase the knowledge of the now tribal inhabitants and learn from their cultures to facilitate understanding in the wasteland.

Timothy Findley's novel Headhunter (1993) features Kurtz's escape from Heart of Darkness and subsequent reign of terror over the city of Toronto as the psychiatrist-in-chief at the Parkin Institute.

Similarly to Apocalypse Now, the setting is changed to World War II–era Burma, where a soldier named Maruo is sent to hunt down the renegade Colonel Kurutsu.