Throughout his narrative in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Charlie Marlow characterizes events, ideas, and locations that he encounters in terms of light or darkness. Embedded in Marlow's parlance is an ongoing metaphor equating light with knowledge and civility and darkness with mystery and savagery. When he begins his narrative, Marlow equates light and, therefore, civility, with reality, believing it to be a tangible expression of man's natural state. Similarly, Marlow uses darkness to depict …showed first 75 words of 1806 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1806 total…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".