Alternate Ending to Heart of Darkness

For all those that felt that Conrad did not end the story “right” with Marlow actually giving the truth, here is a possible ending in which he gives the truth to the Intended, coming in right after she asks him to give her Kurtz’s last words, and returning right before the perspective returns to the Narrator.

“I could feel the Darkness rising up, the fearful thing from the past colliding solidly into the present, trying to connect and re-live itself, to continue itself to infinity. Then I felt the fear, the pain, the insanity, the thing which had changed the memory of this Shade wrapped in the shadows into something else, something that would become the Kurtz I thought I knew, from the amount I could glean from the instants I felt his presence, this being, that had left the earth long before I would hear of him in the Darkness.

“Then I turned to her, and told her the feeling that was all around. The rising thing that had rose up in Kurtz at his last, ‘The Horror, the Horror.’

“She looked at me first as if this was impossible, that would not his beloved’s name be the only thing he could have thought at his lowest? Then, she changed, to question why I would commit such a crime as to give the painful, sharp Truth, which cut through all veils, and then her, too, like a bright, flashing saber. At last, she finished with understanding, as if she actually understood what Kurtz had meant in his view from and into the abyss, that the only horror was that he could not be there with her then in the present.

“She then turned, lost in thought, back into the shadowy recesses of the room, to dwell on her now seemingly complete memory of her devoted.

“I turned and left after as she did, horrified at what I had done, my mind petrified in what I could have done…”