Heart of darkness/Question No.

-4

Narrative Technique

As we begin to read the novel we have a feeling that we are going to read a
conventional novel with an omniscient narrator. But soon we realise that the speaker is only
the frame narrator who was actually one of the listeners on board the Nellie when Marlowe
told his tale. In other words, the narrator is telling the story that he had heard from
Marlowe. This nameless narrator introduces Marlowe actually. Thus it is a story within a
story. Since the nameless narrator is repeating what he had heard from Marlowe in
Marlowe’s words we are one degree removed already from the original experience of
Marlowe. The tale that the nameless narrator tells us is bound to be modified by the
sensibility of the frame narrator. Marlowe and a number of listeners make the narration
dramatic and give it a dialogic structure.
On the surface level, the frame narrator begins and ends the story on the deck of
the Nellie and his story contains Marlowe’s story. Marlowe’s story also will contain Kurtz’s
story with a number of narrative inlands. Since it is mainly Marlowe’s story that constitutes
the main burden of the novel, the frame narrator warns us quite early that we should
expect a conventional story and therefore no conventional narrative mode either. He says:
“Marlowe was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns is expected), and 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, in the likeness of one of those misty halos
that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.”
The nameless narrator’s comment on the nature of Marlowe’s narration makes two things
clear. First, in the case of Marlowe’s tale the form cannot be separated from the content.
There is an inseparability of form and content. Secondly, and more importantly, the tale is
presented in such away that we cannot hope to grasp it in concrete and tangible terms. It
remains vague or indistinct. This is so, as the tale abundantly makes clear, because what
Marlowe wants to convey is his impression of life, and this cannot be presented or even
summed up neatly in a mathematical formula. The analogy that the nameless narrator uses
to describe the nature of Marlowe’s tale has a dream like quality and we shall hear Marlowe
frequently to insist that he is trying to convey dream sensation: “It seems to me I am
trying to tell you a dream.” He realises that he has set upon himself an impossible task. The
vision that he wants to communicate cannot be stated in clear, logical and syllogistic terms;
it can, at best, only be suggested. The best way to suggesting something is to use symbols.
So, Conrad uses symbolic mode while the dream like quality of the experience gives the
narration an impressionistic texture.
Conrad believed hat all great art is essentially symbolic. He said, “a work of art is
very seldom limited to one exclusive meaning and not necessarily tending to a definite
conclusion. And this for the reason the nearer it approaches art, the more it acquires a
symbolic character” (quoted by Ian Watt). In Heart of Darkness the journey is itself
symbolic. Marlow’s journey into the heart of darkness is somewhat similar to the journey of
the epic heroes to the underworld as a part of their mission. Aeneas journeyed to Hades, so

Heart of darkness/Question No.-4

Heart of darkness/Question No.-4

did Hercules, and even Beowulf’s journey to the den of Grendel’s mother is in keeping with
this convention. When Marlow journeys to the heart of Africa, he plunges from the surface
of civilisation into the inner primitivism of man. The experience is, in a way, ‘hellish’ to him.
Even the name and the description of the boat are also symbolic. The story opens
with Marlowe’s voice:
“The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sail and was at
rest… the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide.”
According to John P. Anderson, Nellie is a nickname for Helen, the Greek semi-goddess. In
the opening scene she is tied up at anchor, she is restrained. We must note the shift in
referring to the boat: from ‘’Nellie”, to “her”, to “it”. This progressive symbolic
depersonalization prepares us for a journey into something bestial.
Conrad’s use of Marlowe as the main narrator, instead of himself, can be
interpreted in a different way. “The shift is not merely technical but intimately connected
with Conrad’s uncertainty and experimentation as a writer of fiction” (Jakob Lothe).
According to Zdzislaw Najder, for Conrad Marlowe is not only a main narrator and an
important character, but a distancing device that helps the author control and shape his
fictional material. In his essay Physical Distance, Edward Bullough regarded ‘distance’ as
the quality that gives an expression aesthetic validity: “Distancing means the separation of
personal affections, whether idea or complex experience, from the concrete personality of
the experience”. As for as Conrad is concerned, Bullough’s general observation blends into
the author’s ‘need for distance’ both from his fiction and, in a complex way, from his
audience, in order to write at all.
The concept of distance needs, however, to be diversified to be helpful critically.
The most important variants are temporal, spatial and attitudinal distance. In Heart of
Darkness, there is a significant temporal distance between Conrad’s personal experience in
the Congo in 1890, on which the fiction is based, and the time of the novella’s writing
approximately eight years later. There is also a very considerable spatial distance between
London, the setting of the narrative act, and the Congo, the place of the main action. Finally
the temporal and spatial distances are related to the ‘attitudinal’ distance, the ideological
perspectives of the narrators and the implied author.

Heart of darkness/Question No.-4