to enslave their fellow Africans. The most explicit instance of this mocking comes from his description of one of his shipmates: 'He was an improved specimen; he could fire up a vertical boilerto look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat, walking on his hind-legs.' Marlow's parody of this man parallels his ironical lauding of civilization, describing a large, seemingly meaningless hole in the slope of a hill as perhaps being 'connected with the philanthropic desire of giving criminals something to do.' Civilization, then, can be said to be a form of iridescent escapism that protects us from the reality buried under its surface. In the end, Marlow is fatalistic about his findings, gazing around London and realizing that perhaps it is better that individuals should be filled with petty delusions than for Marlow to preach to them like some deluded, living Thomas Marley. In the end, however, Marlow's message is heard by his listeners, as the narrator raises his head at the end of the novel to discover that the Thames seemed to 'lead into the heart of an immense darkness,'' thus accepting, like Marlow, that the moral to be gained from Kurtz's experience is that the only 'reality', 'truth', or 'light' about civilization is that it is, regardless of appearances, unreal, absurd, and shrouded in 'darkness'. ...
