"Restraint!"

“Was it superstition, disgust, patience, fear –or some kind of primitive honour? No fear can stand up to hunger, no patience can wear it out, and disgust simply does not exist where hunger is…” (Pg 76) Marlow recalls that they (the cannibals) have been starving, but he doesn’t understand why the didn´t eat the non-cannibals on board. “Restraint,” is one of the possibilities, but why restrain to their way of life? Further more, it is very difficult to act rationally when hunger is present. 

By hungry, I don´t mean being hungry between meals. No. It is to go by days with out eating, because there is no way to get a hold of food. Unfortunately, this is a problem in Colombia and a factor seen world wide, especially in third-world countries, where the poor people are miserable. They can´t carry a decent life, because in this competing world, they have lost. Many don´t even have the opportunities to succeed, and end up working underpaid jobs, or not working at all. And then we see the consequences of not having a decent pay. Most people that are considered “poor” don´t even have enough money to buy food, water, a living space, which are they necessities of life.

Most of the time, this leads people to the wrong places. Driven by hunger and desperation, people go to extremes to be able to cease the pain. Some could steal, but others could even kill to make the pain go away. When hunger strikes, people loose all of their essence, and focus only on their existence. It is during this state that we see the human nature of surviving: the “survival of the fittest.” 

So why didn´t the cannibals eat the people on board? If we compare them to poor people, we can say that the poor know better. They live within a society that educates them on how to act. Cannibals are isolated from society because they are different form everybody else. People would think that it is more probable that cannibals strike before the poor, but in the book it does not happen. Maybe there is something about cannibals that we are not aware, some sort of humanity obscured by the fact that they eat their own races. We may be blinded and not see that cannibals are still humans.