First-time readers of Heart of Darkness may be initially puzzled by Conrad’s decision to have Marlow’s story told to the reader by the anonymous narrator who listens to Marlow on the deck of the Nellie. Such a reader may wonder why Conrad would make Heart of Darkness a frame tale at all and not simply begin with Marlow telling the story, as many first-person narratives do. The reason is that Conrad’s frame narrator, like the reader, learns that his ideas about European imperialism are founded on a number of lies that he has wholeheartedly believed. By the end of the novel, Marlow’s tale significantly changes the narrator’s attitude toward the ships and men of the past.
Heart of Darkness begins not on a steamboat fighting its way upriver in the Congo, but on the deck of a “cruising yawl”—a boat used more for domestic trade than overseas imperial conquests. All is still: The sails do not flutter, the tide has subsided and the wind is “nearly calm.” Immediately the reader sees a contrast between the serene European setting and the chaotic and threatening African landscape described later.
The narrator begins speaking as the day is drawing to a close; his descriptions of the sky and weather suggest both beauty and mystery. While his descriptions contribute to the atmosphere aboard the Nellie, they also reflect the moral “haze” and “mist” in which Marlow finds himself as he journeys closer and closer to Kurtz. The afternoon is thus like the tale that Marlow will tell: ambiguous, brooding, and, above all, “dark.”
Note that the narrator remarks that for Marlow, “the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the talk which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze.” This is an important description of Marlow’s—and, by extension, Conrad’s—technique: Heart of Darkness is as much “about” a man’s witnessing horror as much as it concerns the same man’s struggle to put his experiences into words. The way that Marlow tells his tale, therefore, is as much a part of the novel as the tale itself. Sentences such as this description of the jungle—“It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention”—and this one about Kurtz’s Report to the Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs—“It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence”—thus demonstrate Marlow’s inability to fully articulate the exact meaning of what he saw in the Congo. Like the sky above the Nellie, Marlow’s language sometimes becomes “hazy” and fails to illuminate the very subjects that his language is presumably trying to clarify.
Before Marlow speaks, however, Conrad allows the reader to glimpse the narrator’s values and assumptions. He first speaks of the Thames as a “venerable stream” that exists to perform “unceasing service” to those who have tamed it: “The old river in its broad reach rested unruffled at the decline of day, after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks.” To the narrator, nature exists to serve mankind, especially mankind’s commerce and trade. This idea of mankind’s dominance over the earth is questioned by Marlow later in the novel, as he looks out at the jungle and asks, “What were we that had strayed in here? Could we handle that dumb thing, or would it handle us? I felt how big, how confoundedly big, was that thing that couldn’t talk, and perhaps was deaf as well. What was in there?” Conrad’s reason for framing Marlow’s narrative thus begins to become apparent: The narrator’s values and assumptions are challenged—although indirectly—by Marlow’s story, and the reader is meant to perceive these two points-of-view as two different understandings of man’s relationship to the natural world and the people in it. Although the narrator states that the Thames leads “to the uttermost ends of the earth,” he never imagines that his civilized London could ever have been (as Marlow calls it), “one of the dark places of the earth.”
Such a contrast between the narrator and Marlow’s attitudes is more readily seen in the way the narrator speaks of what he sees as England’s glorious past. According to him, the Thames is a river that has served the nation in efforts of both trade and exploration. The narrator finds glory and pride in his nation’s past, assured in his knowledge that “knight-errants” of the sea have brought “sparks from the sacred fire” of civilization to the most remote corners of the earth. While these “knights” may have resorted to the “sword,” they have also passed the “torch,” and, in doing so, made the world a more prosperous and civilized place. (Recall the painting by Kurtz that Marlow sees at the Central Station.) The narrator knows the men and their ships and speaks of them in a reverential tone. Europe’s past is the history of brave adventurers conquering the unknown, and, in the process, transforming “the dreams of men” into “the seeds of commonwealths” and “the germs of empires.”
Clearly, this vision of Europe as a civilizing and “torch-bearing” force does not accord with Marlow’s portrayal of it in his narrative. While institutions like the Company may ostensibly wish to help the less fortunate peoples of the earth (as Kurtz’s Report to the Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs and his painting in the Accountant’s office suggest), Marlow learns that the narrator’s version of imperialism is a lie. The Europeans he meets are not “knight-errants” but “faithless pilgrims”; the Company does not bring a “spark from that sacred fire,” but death, and instead of a bright “jewel,” flashing “in the night of time,” the Company is a “rapacious” and “weak-eyed devil.” Marlow’s story thus challenges the reader—who may hold some of the same opinions as the narrator—to view the men of the Company not as men engaged in a great mission, but instead as men engaged in “a weary pilgrimage amongst hints for nightmares.”
At the end of the novel Marlow’s tale has significantly changed the narrator’s attitude toward European imperialism. The narrator compares him to “a meditating Buddha”—clearly he has been touched by Marlow’s teachings. While the Director of Companies remarks, “We have lost the flow of the ebb” because he wants to break the uncomfortable silence created by the power of Marlow’s story, the narrator has been too affected by Marlow’s ideas, and his enlightenment affects his description of what he sees as he looks at the Thames: a dark river leading to “an immense darkness.”
The Director of Companies remains aloof, since his living is made presumably by the same horrific processes that Marlow has just described. Only the narrator—and the reader—understand Marlow’s initial point: “Civilized” Europe was once also a “dark place,” and it has only become more morally dark through the activities of institutions such as the Company.[/englishtext]
لا تستطيع كتابة مواضيع جديدة في هذا المنتدى لا تستطيع كتابة ردود في هذا المنتدى لا تستطيع تعديل مشاركاتك في هذا المنتدى لا تستطيع حذف مشاركاتك في هذا المنتدى لا تستطيع إرفاق ملف في هذا المنتدى
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