"Heads on the Stakes"

Our group was inspired by a passage on page 53: “I had no idea of the conditions, he said: these heads were the heads of rebels. I shocked him excessively by laughing. Rebels! What would be the next definition I was to hear? There had been enemies, criminals, workers – and these were rebels.”

This is a very crucial part in Heart of Darkness, because the protagonist realizes that Kurtz is not that perfect as he was described earlier in the book. Marlow says that Kurtz had “heads on the stakes” right in front of his house (52). Even though our picture looks very unreal with the snow with a bunch of leaves and sticks on top, it is still really creepy and terrifying. Obviously, it would have been even scarier with actual human heads on sticks. This barbaric action just proves one more time that Kurtz is mentally unstable.