He indirectly refers to Greek mythology and Dante’s Paradiso when he writes that the men “grope together/And avoid speech/Gathered on this beach of the tumid river/Sightless, unless/The eyes reappear/As the perpetual star/Multifoliate rose/Of death’s twilight kingdom/The hope only/Of empty men”(60-69). Unlike the men in the poem whose hollow nature refers to how lifeless and useless they have become, Kurtz is hollow in the sense that he has effectively absorbed the evil from his dark surroundings because nothing inside of him can stop him from doing so.Īfter demonstrating how morally hollow the men are, Eliot makes allusions to convey how abandoned these men have become due to their hollow nature. By portraying the wilderness as a powerful human-like force, Conrad exposes Kurtz’s hollow interior because the dark, savage nature has taken over Kurtz and molded him into the inhumane figure he has been until his peril. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core”(128). In order to communicate how remote Kurtz is from his sense of morality, Conrad personifies the eerie and brutal wilderness as it “had whispered to him things about himself…and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating.
These men act with so much fear that the effect of their actions gradually disappear into a vast and dark “shadow.”” Unfortunately, Kurtz is just as hollow as the men in Eliot’s poem. Just like how ideas become useless when they do not become reality and how motions become useless when they do not achieve the desired act, the “hollow” men become useless because they are not prepared to deal with the moral consequences of their actions. Eliot’s parallel structure allows him to list numerous examples that readers can visualize to understand how the men cannot fulfill what they want to achieve because of their distance from morality. After utilizing a variety of diction and imagery to underscore the hollow nature of these cowards, such as the “headpiece filled with straw” and “dry grass” lacking water, Eliot incorporates parallelism in claiming that “between the idea/And the reality/Between the motion/And the act/Falls the Shadow”(74-78). Both Eliot and Conrad emphasize how Kurtz and the men have lost their moral character and how they have become stranded as a result.Įliot demonstrates how truly “hollow” the men have become as a result of their fears toward moral questioning.
Eliot describes a group of men distant from moral judgment who are desperately finding their way to one of God’s kingdoms while Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness dramatizes the drastic psychological changes that Kurtz goes through as he becomes more evil during his life in Africa.
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