Russian Doll Effect
"To [Marlow]
the meaning of an episode was not inside
like a kernel,
but outside, enveloping the tale which
brought it out
as a glow brings out a haze."
The structure of Heart of Darkness is much
like that of the
Russian nesting dolls, where you open each
doll up, and there is
another doll inside. Much of the meaning in
Heart of Darkness is
found not in the center of the book, the heart
of Africa, but on
the periphery of the book. In what happens
to Marlow in Brussels,
what is happening on the Nellie as Marlow
tells the story, and
what happens to the reader as they read the
book.
In Heart of Darkness, we have an outside narrator
telling us a
story he has heard from Marlow. The story
Marlow tells seems to
center around a man named Kurtz. However,
most of what Marlow
knows about Kurtz, he has learned from other
people, many of whom
have good reason for not being truthful to
Marlow. Therefore
Marlow has to piece together much of KurtzÕs
story. We gradually
get to know very little more about Kurtz.
What we do learn, is
only through interpreting his actions by what
we think we already
know. Part of the meaning in Heart of Darkness
is that we learn
about "reality" through other people's accounts
of it, many of
which are, themselves, twice-told tales. Part
of the meaning of
the novel, too, is the possibly unreliable
nature of our teachers;
Marlow is the source of our story, but he
is also a character
within the story we read, and a flawed one
at that. Marlow's macho
comments about women and his insensitive reaction
to the "dead
negro" with a "bullet hole in his forehead"
cause us to refocus
our critical attention, to shift it from the
story being retold,
to the storyteller whose supposedly autobiographical
yarn is being
repeated.