NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE IN HEART OF DARKNESS

On the surface, Heart of Darkness is a short novel about a

long voyage into the depths of the Congo. It is, however, an
allegory, like Bunyan’s Pilgrim's Progress or Dante’s Divine
Comedy. The narrator’s actual, literal voyage is symbolic of
the
more profound voyage of the soul on which it discovers that
the heart of man is dark and capable of monstrous evil.
Like Christian and Dante, Conrad’s narrator, Marlow,
in the course of his nightmare journey, makes discoveries
about himself and his relation to good and evil.
As in Lord Jim, the narration proceeds by means of
complicated
time shifts. The prose style is lushly romantic and richly
suggestive, the words “dark” and “black” recurring with
haunting suggestiveness. Conrad says of Marlow that “to
him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel
but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out
only as a glow brings out a haze.” This is the esthetic theory
that underlies the writing of Heart of Darkness, which is
mysteriously suggestive and allusive rather than explicit or
realistic.
The real “facts” of the story stem from a voyage like
Marlow’s that Conrad made into the Congo in 1890 just after
he had begun to write Almayers Folly. The voyage was
every bit as harrowing as Marlow’s. The Mr. Kurtz who died
aboard Conrad’s boat was in reality a Georges-Antoine Klein
whom Conrad had picked up at Stanley Falls. Eventually
Conrad fell ill, and the whole experience effectively ended
his career as a sailor.
What is significant about the story is not its foundation in
actual fact but the implications that Conrad draws from the
facts.
“All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz,” Marlow
tells us, and indeed he is a representative figure of the lust for
plunder which ravaged Africa in the nineteenth century and
which attempted to conceal its rapacity under the guise of
idealism.
The true horror of the story lies not in Kurtz’s degeneration
and ultimate despair but in Marlow s growing realization that
he, too, is capable of undergoing the moral regression that
destroyed Kurtz. He is made painfully aware of the savagery
pulsating behind the most civilized facade.
Relationships between metropolis and colony lie at the heart
of much modernist literature and culture. Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness was described by the critic Edward Said as
‘a kind of relentlessly open-ended, aggressively critical
inquiry into the mechanisms and presuppositions and
situatedness and abuses of imperialism’, and as a work that
‘has obviously compelled many, many other writers to write
in its wake’. Heart of Darkness revolves around ambiguity,
ambivalence and the unsayable. This has been one of the most
significant conditions for its various rewritings,
and for the fact that it has created a literary and cultural legacy
both complex and unresolved.
The narrator is a source of information, which flows from the
novelist to the reader and may also be regarded as a means by
which communication between the novelist and the reader is
enabled. “One of the …devices of the storyteller is the trick of
going beneath the surface of the action to obtain a reliable
view of a character’s mind and heart” (Booth). The narrator
describes events in the narrative, addressing the audience
directly. He also communicates to the readers, the state of
mind and emotion of the characters described. The novelist’s
use of a narrator serves to establish a close relationship
between the writer and the reader. The writer, very subtly, is
able to put forth his point of view and his comments without
allowing the reader to feel his presence. This method of
narration is extremely effective for the narrator sets the tone
of the tale that he narrates whilst also conveying the novelist’s
point of view through multiple narrative strategies. Although
Conrad’s fiction betrays an ongoing concern with the way in
which personal as well as collective identities are constructed
through storytelling, the Marlovian narratives offer a
particularly fruitful ground for an examination. An almost
exclusively oral storyteller whose narratives are always
introduced by an anonymous narrator at a higher narrative
level, Marlow tells the greater part of as many as four of
Conrad’s works. In all of these texts Youth, Heart of
Darkness, Lord Jim and Chance Marlow relates to his listener
or listeners a narrative in which he himself features as a
character. All these factors combined make him the ideal
narrator for Conrad to dramatize the close relation between
narration and identity. The fact that there is another narrator
describing how Marlow addresses an audience, in Chance,
mostly a single listener, draws attention to the act of narration
and thus to the process of identity construction. In other
words, the Marlovian narratives show identity in the making.
That Marlow always tells a tale, at least partly, about him also
means that Conrad can exploit the difference between the
narrator and the character; he can formulate the way in which
the narrating self relates to the actions and thoughts of his past
self. The fact that Marlow appears in four works encourages
the readers to consider how his identity evolves from text to
text. However, there is no clear continuity between his
incarnations because he creates himself anew in each of his
narratives. What makes the figure of Marlow especially
interesting is that he not only allows Conrad to dramatize
identity-construction in the fiction; it is also partly through
Marlow that Conrad creates his own literary identity.
Heart of Darkness is a highly complex and layered text in
which communication takes place at various different levels.
This complexity alone, however, cannot fully explain why it
is sometimes so difficult to distinguish between the particular
instances of senders and receivers. Conrad himself used
narrative to reengage indirectly with his complicity in the
colonial enterprise in the Congo. In Heart of Darkness,
Conrad certainly suggests that there is no ultimate truth about
the self and that language is an imperfect tool for self-
expression and for rendering experience. But the text also
demonstrates how language and narrative can help the readers
cope with the past by organizing the fragmentary experiences
into a coherent whole. Although Marlow will probably need
to retell this narrative to find the effective story with which he
can fully identify, he is shown to be moving towards a
coherent understanding of his Congo experiences. By
extension, that Conrad may have written Heart of Darkness at
least partly in order to come to terms with his traumatic
experiences as well as with his complicity in what he had seen
in the Congo. Joseph Conrad, through Marlow expresses his
inner feelings, be it of joy at a young sailor’s first command
or his first view of the East. He expresses dismay at the
meaningless destruction in Africa, the cost a man has to pay
for his pursuit of greatness as seen in the case of Jim as in
Lord Jim and the role of destiny when one like Flora in
Chance has to suffer because of no apparent fault.