Brook Thomas: Preserving and Keeping Order by

Brook Thomas: Preserving and Keeping Order by Killing Time in Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" Brook Thomas is fairly more complex in redefining lies in Preserving and Keeping Order by Killing Time in Joseph Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'," even though he himself does it in a paragraph. Thomas aims on leading his readers from a restatement of the hatred of lies that Marlow had to an affirmation that Marlow trounces that hatred and accepts the condition that produces lies.

While defining the process, Thomas redefines both the issues: "lies" and the reason for Marlow's hatred of them. He writes early in the paragraph: "So long as truth cannot fully be represented, lies become part of the truth of the world." (250) Evidently, Thomas initially uses truth to denote "internal reality"; that which Marlow is concerned with, and which cannot be fully represented by anyone. Thereafter, he redefines it in his next use to indicate the "condition" or "state" of the world in which lies continue living, simultaneously redefining lies.

According to and for Marlow, lies were untruth uttered to deceive the listener. Thomas conversely enlarges the term to embrace accidental untruths that are not intended to deceive, honest mistakes, and all forms of fiction by setting "lies" against the truth that cannot fully be represented. Undoubtedly, mortality is one form of human finiteness or shortcoming, but it is hardly the only form.

Though Marlow goes on to say about mortality that it made him miserable and sick, like biting something rotten, (Conrad 41, 42), Brook Thomas suggested a new relationship between lies and mortality by redefining mortality in the second phase of the book. The author completes his sentence concerning "the truth of human finitude" by providing its parallel: "The truth of our existence in a fallen state in which we cannot have full access to truth, a state making lies inevitable." Due to human finitude and inability to have constant and complete access.