THE NARRATOR
Marlow is the principal narrator in Heart of Darkness.
Conrad rightly laughs at those of us who debate whether Marlow is or is not Conrad. Clearly, Marlow is both, at the same time that he is neither. Marlow is, in the Elizabethan sense, an invention- something come across, something happened upon, something uncovered- something discovered in the very process of writing.(16)
Heart of Darkness is not, then, Marlow's story exclusively. And if we examine it for a moment as the creation of the nameless member of Marlow's audience, it takes on a different coloration. The narrator's inclusion of Marlow's story within his point of view appears as a deliberate attempt on his part to frame the concrete world and man's involvement with this world in a vision which negates the reality of both. "Heart of Darkness" creates for us the visible surface of life, but does so in such a way that we never forget that this surface is a lie. It leads us to Kurtz, but does so in such a way that we never accept his idealism at face value. And this destruction of both possible grounds for the self, grounds toward which all versions of the adventure for Conrad are directed, results in the radical transformation in the intent of writing. It is no longer one form of the adventure, an act by which man could assure his positive existence. For the anonymous narrator, writing performs precisely the opposite function. It becomes a way of destroying any idea of an act which can confer such an identity by destroying all belief in a reality toward which this act can be directed.
Thus for the narrator to place Marlow's positive, creative journey within the context of a negating darkness is for him to accept the insubstantiality of the self. It is to accept the fact that man can never transcend the conditional existence of his original, orphaned state, and it is this acceptance of his own insubstantiality which is the source of the narrator's strength. Because he exercises his knowledge not only against the world around him but against himself, because he seems to realice that "one's personality is only a ridiculous and aimless masquerade of something hopelessly unknown", he is able to confront the darkness with the proper attitude of cold unconcern. Like Kurtz and Marlow, the anonymous narrator makes his voyage into the darkness, a voyage defined by the Nellie's swing during the course of the narrative from its position facing the "luminous estuary" to its final heading "into the heart of an immense darkness". Yet it is clear from the narrator's calm acceptance of this final vision, an acceptance which contrasts so strongly with Marlow's lie to the Intended, that he does not feel threatened. Because he has accepted the darkness to the point where even the final commitment to a positive self vanishes, he is not susceptible to the sense of vulnerability which overwhelms Marlow. He can say, in the words Conrad used to Cunninghame-Graham, "je ne regrete rien,- je n'espère rien, car je m'aperçois que ni le regret ni l'espérance signifient rien à ma personalité".
For this narrator, then, the act of writing Heart of Darkness is an act of self-denial, a self-denial which is apparent in the very tone of the narrator's voice. In contrast to Kurtz and Marlow, his voice has a curiously passive quality, so that, although he occasionally uses the first person, his statements do not really appear as acts of assertion by an "I". Significantly, he presents himself as a listener, not as an actor or speaker, and contents himself with weaving an abstract, symbolic frame in his descriptions of the setting of Marlow's story. If in giving us Marlow's narrative he creates a world, he does so only to deny its reality. Like the dark force at the centre of creation, he brings forth an existence at the same time that he denies this existence. And like this force, he is characterized not by a positive identity but by his ephemerality. His anonymity defines him.
If Conrad's remark that the novelist lives in his work and that in writing he "is only writing about himself" applies to Conrad's own situation, then we can say that he exists in "Heart of Darkness" in two radically distinct ways. He is at once Marlow and the anonymous narrator. He is at once engaged in the active creation of a world and at the same time cursed by the awareness that this world is a lie. The emergence of the anonymous narrator images the emergence of Conrad's destructive awareness of the ephemerality of creation.
This novel is, in many ways, a summary of Conrad's experience of the previous three years. It offers a systematic statement of the destruction of the visible surface of life by the darkness, but it does so in order to provide a context for the formulation of a new aesthetics, and it is here that Conrad makes his choice between Marlow and the anonymous narrator, between the dream and the darkness.(17)
While Heart of Darkness is the story of the story of Marlow's venture up the Congo River to Stanley Falls, Marlow's interest (to the regret of the reporting narrator) is centred in Kurtz:
I don't want to bother you much with what happened to me personally', he began, showing in his remark the weakness of many tellers of tales who seem so often unaware of what their audience would best like to hear; "yet to understand the effect of it on me you ought to know how I got out there, what I saw, how I went up that river to the place where I first met the poor chap".
Hence, it is Kurtz's story that Marlow is telling, even before he and we meet Kurtz. But Marlow's story is the mediating story between the inner one of Kurtz's invasion of the so-called Belgian Congo and the outer story that Conrad is telling of Europe's invasion of Africa. Without Kurtz's story, Heart of Darkness would, like Youth, be a simultaneous celebration of self and satire of society. But with Kurtz the reverberations and implication multiply, for Kurtz is the central symbol.
In Youth and Heart of Darkness we are forced by the narrator into the hands of Marlow and are compelled to listen to him for the clues and codes, signs and symbols of significance.(18)
Commentaries of others authors about the narrator
Ian Watt has suggested that Heart of Darkness embodies more thoroughly than any previous fiction the posture thoroughly than any previous fiction the posture of uncertainty and doubt. Not only does it use oblique narration to produce an open-ended fiction, but epistemological doubts are expressed through the device which Watt has called "delayed decoding". The narrative presents the character's immediate sensations, only to open up a gap between impression and to foreground the process of interpretation.
Peter Brooks has similarly explored Heart of Darkness's uncertainties from a narratological perspective. Where the classic framed tale produced a set of nested boxes, of brackets within brackets, Marlow's narrative plot steadily takes as its story what Marlow understands to be Kurtz's story, but Kurtz's story "never fully exists, never fully gets itself told". Marlow's journey back to origins promises to gain its meaning from its attachment to Kurtz's prior journey, but Kurtz's articulation at what Marlow identifies as "the farthest point of navigation and the culminating point of my experience" is "a blurted emotional reaction of uncertain reference and context" which "makes a mockery of story-telling and ethics". After Marlow has retraced Kurtz's journey up-river through the stories of other quests and journeys, Kurtz's own story is at last conveyed to Marlow in a non-narrated way, "in desolate exclamations, completed by shrugs, in interrupted phrases, in hints ending in deep sighs". It becomes one among a series of possible plots, of alternative signifying systems, that offer to explain reality "if only one could believe them". In the end Marlow's own narrative arrives only at the suggestion of a motive for its own telling: as if the conventional narrative ending he supplies in Brussels has condemned him to the guilty unconventional narration he produces on the Thames.(19)
(16) ã The World's Classics
Joseph Conrad. Youth, Heart of Darkness, The End of the Tether.
Edited with an introduction by robert Kimbrough.
Introduction, Notes, Blossary ã Robert Kimbrough-1984
Pages: 10 and 11.
(17) ã The Metaphysics of Darkness . Royal Roussel.
A study in the unity and development of Conrad's Fiction.
1971- The John's Hopkins Press by Baltimore and London
Pages: 77, 78 and 79.
(18) ã The World's Classics
Joseph Conrad. Youth, Heart of Darkness, The End of the Tether
Edited with an introduction by robert Kimbrough.
Introuduction, Notes, Glossary ã Robert Kimbrough- 1984
Pages: 14, 15 and 23.
(19) ã Heart of Darkness with the Congo Diary
Introduction and Notes ãRobert Hampson, 1995
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England.
Pages: 26 and 27.