The Real Reason for Kurtz' Madness

"Excessive solitude often breeds madness." - Avaris

Madness is a very broad and abstract term, but anyone can recognize a mad man sooner or later because of his actions and his way of being. It can be hard at first, but after a while, there is certainty that a person is not acting normally. In Kurtz's case, there are a lot of signs that he is a very abnormal man, which in turn is caused by his solitude. 

The first piece of evidence is the posts he set up outside his home. What Marlow thought were ornamental picket fences adorning his place were actually severed heads put on fence posts turned toward the station house. This is clearly a sign that he has turned into a savage; no one in Europe ("the civilized society") would even think of doing this, but Kurtz is looking at western behavior through the rear-view mirror on his way to crazy and is acting very delusional. 

He is also known, through the Russian sailor that lives with him, to wander through the forests for months at a time to hunt for ivory. Though it is "man's instinct" to look for materialist things, his thirst for this precious object has gone way too far. He would kill for only a little bit of it, as the Russian sailor told Marlow. Its true that all humans in western civilization are in a rat race to be the richest and the most successful, but Kurtz has gone over this standard and is literally crazy for such materialist things as ivory, even in a world where he lives where it doesn't matter so much: alone in the middle of the jungle and without much contact with Europe. He was sent to that station house to trade for ivory and his obsession for money, added to his mental regression due to his isolation from mankind, made him crazy for ivory and eliminate money because currency didn't help him survive in that environment. As the quote states, his excessive solitude between his trading post, where a ship passed through maybe once a month, and the forest, where he could not speak clearly with the tribe he befriended, made him delusional. 

 Other questions still remain unresolved. Does being with other people make us sane and being alone crazy, or viceversa? How can we know? Maybe Kurtz is a symbol for the decay of the human being, where he stands as a natural breed of a person and everyone else around him are the mad ones, perverted by society. Kurtz can just be returning to the pure essence of humans, where his solitude and protection from society forced him to return to his roots and behave the way he should. One way or the other, we may never know which is the true essence of man.