This document discusses different critics' perspectives on the ambiguous rites performed by Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. Some critics refuse to examine the rites due to their horrific nature, while others seek to analyze them. One critic argues that while the text does not explicitly depict cannibalism, there are subtle hints that could imply Kurtz or Europeans engaged in anthropophagy. Additionally, Kurtz's unspeakable rites may have involved human sacrifice and consuming portions of sacrificial victims in order to establish himself as a god-like figure to the natives. The absence of explicit cannibalism in the text puzzles some readers expecting its inclusion as a signifier of the story's darkness and savagery.

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2.  These rites are so horrible and terrible to the
extent that critics have refused to examine
them.
 These critics take such a stand as they tend
to associate the ambiguity centering around
Kurtz's rites with Conrad's desire to leave
them covered in uncertainty.
 Some critics are keen to examine

3.  One of the critics notes, we cannot be sure
that Kurtz's "unspeakable" crimes in Africa
extended to cannibalism, yet he may be
wrong in claiming that Conrad himself cannot
bear to speak the unspeakable by explicitly
depicting a white man such as Kurtz as
cannibal.
 In fact, Heart of Darkness opens and closes
with subtle hints of white or European
cannibalism.
 Marlow tells his listeners that cannibals are
"fine fellows . . . in their place"

4.  Heart of Darkness refuses to keep them in
their place by beginning and ending with
oblique references to cannibalism, not in the
"heart of darkness," but rather in the heart
of whiteness.
 In this way, while the center of the text is
essentially empty of acts of cannibalism, its
extremities provide clues that hint at white
anthropophagic.

5.  A number of readers have recently identified
a similar, subtle hint of white cannibalism
very early in Heart of Darkness.
 There is a hole in the heart of Heart of
Darkness, and this absence is the "cannibal.“
 Conrad's readers would have been
conditioned by previous exotic stories set in
Africa to expect the sorts of savage native
behavior—and in particular, cannibalism—one
sees in British colonial fiction from
Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.

6.  Conrad's stress on cannibalism, his
identification of African customs with
violence, lust, and madness, his metaphors
of bestiality, death, and darkness.
 his suggestion that traveling in Africa is like
traveling backward in time to primeval,
infantile, but also hellish stages of existence.
 these features of the story are drawn from
the repertoire of Victorian imperialism and
racism that painted an entire continent dark.

7.  Readers encountering Heart of Darkness for
the first time at the turn of the century must
then have been puzzled by the absence of
the alleged cannibal practices.
 They would have expected to see as a
primary signifier of "darkness" and savagery
as the plot developed.

8.  Kurtz’s unspeakable rites and secrets
concern (with whatever attendant bestiality)
human sacrifice and Kurtz’s consuming a
portion of the sacrificial victim.
 Further, these sacrifices were established in
the interest of effecting Kurtz’s position as a
man-god.

9.  one of the critics depicts the unspeakable
rites, “Kurtz had assumed a position of
power with respect to the natives and had
been a participant in “unspeakable rites,”
where sacrifices had been made in his
name.”