I just finished reading this novel and wanted to drop some of my thoughts on it.
I've seen a lot of the discussion on this book focus on the the atrocities of colonialism, the racist worldview of the characters and possibly the author, the descent into madness that "civilized" people go through when stripped of their civilization, etc. And this is all fine and discussed ad nauseum, but I haven't seen much about how this novel is basically about how absurd and nonfunctional colonialism is.
Almost all of the story is spent on showing how the colonizing Europeans are just flailing around and have completely lost the plot. The ship firing into an empty coastline to defeat the "enemy" that isn't there, while the crew is actively dying. The random detonations on a mountain to build a railroad that will never be built, and the digging of random holes by exhausted and dying men, just to show that "work" is getting done. The steamboat that takes months to fix because it needs rivets, which there are a ton of at the shore but nobody seems to remember to bring them or have them stocked anywhere useful. All the cowardly pajama wearing agents that can't aim a gun correctly plotting and scheming to climb up the company ladder but never actually doing anything so as not to rock the boat, so to speak. Nobody knows what they are doing. This whole nonsense, broken system is held up purely on technological superiority over the natives; literally nothing else.
The only competent, functional man here is Mr. Kurtz. He came to do imperialism, to extract resources, and he's doing an incredible job at it, making all the other agents jealous and disdainful of him. He uses his vast charisma, natural talents, and willingness to dive into the culture to become a god-king of a local tribe and exact ivory tribute from other tribes. There really isn't any mention of any horrific atrocities he commits that exceed what we saw anywhere else. He just did what all the other agents weren't willing to do: his job. There were all willing to brutalize and terrorize the local populace, he just decided to do it in a way that actually accomplished the task the company set out to do here, which was extract resources. And for all this, Mr. Kurtz is considered insane and unsound for daring to do his job in an efficient, if unorthodox, manner.
Marlowe sees this, as does the Russian kid, and they respect the hell out of him even though he's not a good person or mentally sound. They see a man who's colonizing, and is willing to sacrifice every bit of what makes him "European" and "civilized" to do it well. Marlowe realizes that colonialism is fundamentally absurd: you either can try to do it as a "gentleman" the "European way" and accomplish nothing but useless suffering, or you can "go native" and lose any "decency" to actually make your colonizing economically worthwhile. Mr. Kurtz dropped any pretense of bringing European "civilization" or "progress" to these people, and did what he needed to do to get the ivory flowing. For all his delusions of grandeur, Kurtz was the least hubristic and the most clear headed agent in the company. He was the perfect colonist, doing exactly what he was asked to do, and it confused and horrified the very society he was asked to do colonialism for.
The idea of colonialism (spreading "civilization" to "savages" and making a buck while doing it) and what it actually means to perform it are so incompatible that you either need try to balance both and accomplish nothing but pure absurdity or strip off the higher ideals and accomplish your task at the price of losing everything it means to be European or "civilized" in the process. One isn't better or more moral than the other, as both are horrific in and of themselves, it's just one is far more effective.
Heart of Darkness's focus is less on the horrors of imperialism and it's damaging effects on the colonized and/or colonizers and more on how imperialism is a fundamentally absurd concept that creates suffering on a massive scale as a natural, useless byproduct. It's basically Catch-22 meets Huckleberry Finn with a little Kafka sprinkled in.
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