"Moderation! I would have immediately expected moderation from a hyena prowling the corpses of a battle," Marlow comments as he wonders why the starving cannibals aboard the his steamship had not gone for the white crew members (Conrad 43). “The look of the steamboat… filled those savages with unbridled grief,” Marlow explains after recalling the cries of the natives as they saw the steamer amid a brief lifting of the fog (Conrad 44). "Poor fool! He had no restraint, no restraint... a mast swayed by the wind," Marlow speaks of a helmsman killed during an attack by tribal savages (Conrad 52). “Mr. Kurtz lacked restraint in satisfying his various lusts,” Marlow says moments after recounting his first glimpse of severed human heads fixed atop the Inner Station poles (Conrad 58). The word is used over and over again throughout the text. Recognizing restraint and the lack thereof in characters as the story progresses in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is crucial to any understanding of the work. The narrator Marlow believes first and foremost that moderation is what separates civilization from chaos and society from savagery. As his journey into the heart of darkness progresses, however, he learns that such a conclusion is rash and that there is much more at issue than that. Literary critic Cedric Watts comments on the ambiguity of the title of Heart of Darkness. In Watts's view, the phrase can mean either "the center of a darkness" or "the heart that has the quality of being dark" (54). This question regarding the meaning of the title can be answered when moderation is considered. Moderation goes hand in hand with rationality, which is associated with the brain. Lack of moderation can,...... middle of paper....... New York: Penguin, 1999. Print.D'Avanzo, Mario "Conrad's Heterogeneous as an Organizational Metaphor." Heart of Darkness. Edited by Robert Kimbrough. New York: Norton & Company, Inc., 1971. 251-253. Henrikson, Bruce. "Heart of Darkness and the Gnostic Myth." Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad Darkness: Modern Critical Interpretations. Edited by Harold Bloom New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986. 45-56.Joseph Conrad.htm. .Ong, Walter J. "Conrad's Truth in the Darkness." Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad Edited by Harold Bloom: Chelsea House Publishers, 1996. 59-62. Watts, Cedric. "Conrad's Heart of Darkness: A Critical and Contextual Discussion." Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad. Edited by Harold Bloom. Broomall: Chelsea House Publishers, 1996. 54-56.