Reality and illusion in Heart of Darkness This fact is very important for Marlow. The facts are understandable. Evil is not a supernatural force or a force in opposition to God or life, but that which is incomprehensible to Marlow. The life of Africans and the power of the jungle – or the broader reality of humanity – is evil in its incomprehensibility. The supreme morality is moderation, and understanding the jungle or accepting its incomprehensibility becomes the symbol of the absence of moderation in man. The purpose is good in its understandability. When Marlow speaks derisively of the French warship fruitlessly bombarding an invisible "enemy" it is because he finds his actions "incomprehensible." Before Marlow engages in the jungle, what he finds extremely comprehensible, what he feels gives purpose, is nature, and he recognizes meaning as sound, voice, or movement. "The idleness of a passenger, my isolation among all these men with whom I had no points of contact, the oily and languid sea, the uniform mist of the coast, seemed to keep me far from the truth of things, within the fatigue of a gloomy and senseless delirium. The voice of the surf heard from time to time was a positive pleasure, like the speech of a brother. It was something natural, which had its own reason, which had a meaning.' (Conrad, 40) This first passage shows Marlow's affinity for sound (especially speech or voice), movement and work. Marlow's reality when he embarks for the Congo is defined primarily by the work. characterized by movement, represented by voice and saturated with meaning. As he enters the heart of darkness, this reality alters and silence is the bearer of meaning that Marlow refuses to understand. middle of paper ...... the implicit ilanthropia is a 'sentimental fiction' and not an 'idea', it is simply an arrogance conceived by civilized and deluded man, one which, however, he would like to embody. Works Cited Conrad, Joseph. Editor Robert Kimbrough. New York, 1983. Cox, C.B. Conrad : Heart of Darkness, Nostromo and Under Western Eyes. London: Macmillan Education Ltd., 1987. Guetti, James. “Heart of Darkness and the Failure of the Imagination,” Sewanee Review LXXIII, no. 3 (summer 1965), pp. 488-502. Ed. CB Cox.Ruthven, KK 'The Savage God: Conrad and Lawrence', Critical Quarterly, x, nn. 1 and 2 (spring and summer 1968), pp. 41-6. Ed. CB Cox.Watt, Cedric. A preface to Corrado. Essex: Longman Group UK Limited, 1993.