honorable battle, so they are excited and fight with all they have. Marlow, however, sees it differently. He is now in Africa where reality broods. It is lurking everywhere. The only thing one has to do to find it is open the mind to new ideas. He looks at this event and reduces it from the European's image of a supposedly intense battle, with smoke and enemies everywhere, to a futile firing of "tiny projectiles" into an empty forest. For the first time, Marlow recognizes the falsity of the European mentality and their inability to characterize an event for what it is. At the end of the passage, his fellow European crewmember assures Marlow that the allied ship is defeating the enemy, and that they just could not see them because they are hidden from sight. In actuality, they were shooting at innocent natives who had probably fled from the area of battle already. Marlow is beginning to realize that what makes sense in Europe does not make sense in Africa. With that passage, Conrad informs the reader of Marlow's realization. Marlow begins to wonder if the mentality instilled upon him in Europe is similar to the reality he sees in Africa, or if he is surrounded by atypical Europeans who are living in a dream world. As the novel continues, Marlow recognizes that the flaw of not being able to see the true essence of things and thus, not being able to identify things and events, is the European way. There are some names given by the Europeans that simply do not fit the characteristic of the object being named. Marlow points out that the name Kurtz means short in German. However, after Marlow's first glance at Kurtz, he remarks how Kurtz appears to be "seven feet long" (59). Conrad shows us, through Marlow's observation, how Kurtz's name is a blatant oxymoron. Marlow recognizes yet another obvious misrepresentation. Marlow meets a man called the bricklayer. However, as Marlow himself points out, "[. . .] there wasn't a fragment of a brick any...
