The two major themes of Heart of Darkness are the conflict between "reality" and "darkness", and the idea of ​​restraint and whether or not it is necessary. Conrad's passage describing the restraint of starving cannibals illustrates both themes: it describes how reality shapes human behavior and contrasts the characters of Kurtz and Marlow. “Reality,” as used here, is defined as “that which is civilized.” Conrad emphasizes the idea of ​​what is real versus what is “dark,” what is civilized versus what is primitive, what colonizes versus what is colonized. repeatedly throughout Heart of Darkness. As noted above, the "real" in this case contains all the implications of a civilized society: clothing that covers a person's sexual organs, restraint of gluttony, a constant reliance on clocks as dictaters of the action, etc. People face a terrible conflict between what is real and what is “dark” or, in their case, what is natural and what must be restricted. Marlow cannot understand how these “great, powerful men, with little capacity to weigh consequences” could contain their desire to consume him and the Pilgrims: “Restraint! What restraint is possible? Was it superstition, disgust, patience, fear – or some kind of primitive honor? No fear can resist hunger, no patience can exhaust it. The “darkness” that these men hold is the part of every person who desires to flourish, the Id in psychoanalytic terms, the part that almost all orthodox religions despise. As in any civilized society, which requires some form of government, citizens are expected to restrain, to some extent, their most basic desires. This theme can be taken a little further, and in the middle of paper......a post describing cannibals illustrates both. Cannibals practice a kind of enigmatic restraint that prevents them from satisfying a basic human need; on a second level, they are confronted with the question of what is reality (what is civilized) and what is natural. Although there is no concrete evidence that these people are cannibals, the natural solution to their hunger is to eat, and they do not do it. Marlow, an emblematic character of the reality of civilization, practices this restraint, a sort of religious emulation of what he has seen so far of civilized peoples. Kurtz, on the other hand, abandoned his restraint, entered the “darkness” so to speak. “The horror!” The horror! he said on his deathbed, perhaps expressing contempt for his own actions, perhaps for existence itself. Perhaps because of reality and the constraints of civilization.