I've been trying hard to get into Heart of Darkness. Having read it...

I once saw a guy say he wrote his dissertation on HoD and the central premise was that Kurtz didn't say "The horror", he said "the whore" referring to his wife

It is a Mark of women to Complain about something, without offering a solution. Do you have a better explanation, Tell us.

A replacement explanation is not required to criticize a previous explanation.

Depends on where you live, odds are not. At my university they handed out student IDs at orientation. Afterwards I was able to check out books at the library.

To be more precise, he was trying to emphasize he cared so little about her that he made a point out of forgetting her name. By the end he genuinely wanted to remember but couldn't dig it out of his feverish, melting mind. Hence: "that whore, errr...".

There's more going on in HoD than a commentary on colonialism, Cedric Thomas Watts has written a Conrad 'reader'/critical and contextual discussion that I'd recommend, mostly for the sections on Conrad's use of the oblique narrative and on the absurdist elements in HoD, but Watts does not make the point that HoD is not just telling a story, it's ABOUT telling a story and coming to grips with its 'horror'
You'll have to stand by me on most of this because I'm not gonna write a fucking essay, but, for example, Watts dwells on the various meanings of 'absurd' in the line 'Absurd? Well, absurd...', and yet the only meaning he doesn't touch is its etymological roots, ab+surdus, meaning something like 'out of tune', and words relating to sound and speech are paradigmatic in HoD, as are those pertaining to measurement (like profound, 'deep-reaching'), and it's this problem of not only measuring, understanding Kurtz, but of telling his story and relating to the 'dark tentacles' of his eloquence (or however Conrad phrases it) which spread out from there.

I probably didn't make myself that clear, but I hope you can use it, and in any case my best advice is to get access to the OED and look up EVERY word in the book that seems important, though ideally all the ones that seem unimportant as well, because that's how you're supposed to study any and every piece of literature ever written.

Kurtz is the Ubermensch, think about it

The problem with Heart of Darkness is that it can be said to be both pro and anti-feminist, both racist and non-racist, proletarian, humanitarian, anti-capiltalist, pro-capitalist.

Ultimately, the only REAL things the story tries to speak about are colonialism and classicism.

If I was you, I would reread the story again and think about how it made you feel, personally. What thoughts you found provoked your imagination the most and what is, right now, driving you to pontificate about the text and seek reflection in the words of it.

To me, I think, the book concerns the idea of suffering. Whether it is a good or bad thing and whether humans are better off with or without it.

Cant tell if bait or this delusional. Please expand on this and give exanples

I watched Apocalypse Now so many times that I had to read Heart of Darkness to see where it all came from.
It was really disappointing to find out that there's not much to it.

Fyi your best bet is using your university's access to JSTOR or whatever. Published physical collections of secondary essays are going to be relatively rare.

Also one of the most remarkable aspects of HoD is the power of Conrad's prose.

>"You know I am not particularly tender; I've had to strike and to fend off. I've had to resist and to attack sometimes -- that's only one way of resisting -- without counting the exact cost, according to the demands of such sort of life as I had blundered into. I've seen the devil of violence, and the devil of greed, and the devil of hot desire; but, by all the stars! these were strong, lusty, red-eyed devils, that swayed and drove men -- men, I tell you. But as I stood on this hillside, I foresaw that in the blinding sunshine of that land I would become acquainted with a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly. How insidious he could be, too, I was only to find out several months later and a thousand miles farther. For a moment I stood appalled, as though by a warning. Finally I descended the hill, obliquely, towards the trees I had seen. "

If you can not tell you are not worth further effort and time. Ponder or dismiss as you wish. I'm done here.

Well, I know I am correct. When The protagonist thinks about all sorts of states, they are all violent. Germany, Mexico's Revolutionaries, all of them. He is trying to Go back to a time of freedom. He is trying to seek out when free men Sold themselves into the slavery of state-ism, The "lost steps" from freedom to State hood. The Main character Failed. Until Savagery is done away with men cannot be free and enlightened. Feminism had nothing to do with this book. You have not provided a single counter argument.

He doesn't need to provide an argument because you're talking out of your ass
Go on and call me bluepilled or claim this victory or whatever because I don't care because you're talking out of your ass

Right

Moral of the story.
Everyone everywhere are kind of fucking dicks.

Does it have to mean something? I read Heart of Darkness and just enjoyed it for its story of struggle.

>All essays and video lectures I have found on the book
If you're not looking for proper academic articles you're wasting your time really. At university you'll get jstor access, or there seem to be some search engines out there for freely-available peer-reviewed journals- not sure what they're like though.

Or look for a collection of essays published by a reputable university press or other academic publisher.

Also I'm fairly sure I saw some news lately about some Murrican university making articles by its scholars open access, but I can't remember which.

Kurtz was just the sailor's spook

There's a lot of allegory and symbolism that plays into various kinds of mysticism throughout the book, you could read up on that a bit though I forget the specific kind

Basically this, essays and video lectures found elsewhere usually ''''''study'''''' literature like you do in high school which is all more or less useless come college.
Cedric Watts' study (mentioned ) is often cited as a good critical source and starting point for Conrad's HoD.

Link related, it's the review for the 2nd edition of Watts, published in the Conradia periodical (also worth checking out):
'For anyone seriously interested in understanding why Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness continues to be hailed as one of the most influential texts of modernist literature and, perhaps, of Western literature tout court, it is a great fortune that Cedric Watts's brilliant study, Conrad's Heart of Darkness: A Critical and Contextual Discussion, is now available again, in a timely and much-needed second edition, for a new generation of students and scholars to read--and reread.'
pastebin.com/yXTQg4Xk