Importance of Narration
Heart of Darkness
By Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness is a novella that consists of a unique type of narration, because it has the style of a story within another story. First of all, an unknown person introduces the reader to the present conditions he is in: ‘The Nellie, a cruising yawl… and wait for the turn of the tide.’ Later on he starts to describe the other members on the ship, such as Marlow. As the story progresses, Marlow becomes the major narrator of the novella. The concept of flashback begins when Marlow talks about his past experiences with a first person narration.
The narration inside Heart of Darkness is full of descriptions and imageries as the narration was simply the descriptor of events. This novella contains a very narrow view, limited by popular thoughts. As Joseph Conrad demonstrates, modernism rejects the aims and methods of realism. The story only offers a kind of reality by consensus, and realism appears to represent the world concisely. However, Heart of Darkness rejects this instead, he exposes the failure of language to give complete reality in the descriptions. In the novella, Marlow is incomplete, and so is his narrative. It is obvious that he is forced into the precision in language and correct, but rarely used English grammar. The reader sees that Marlow sometimes struggles to narrate his story in a satisfactory way and the narration is normally deficient. The limitation of language then becomes the focus of the novella. In spite of this, Heart of Darkness presents an even better expression of reality than any other similar works.
Joseph Conrad also gives Marlow the narrator credibility, which allows the readers to be able to trust everything they hear from Marlow. This is very influential because in this novella, the only viewpoint the readers have and know is from Marlow. Whether it is believable or not all depends on how well Conrad writes and leads the readers. As a result, narration then...