Technical Features

Abstract

Because Conrad is profoundly aware that there is an apparently unfathomable depth to most areas of human experience, as a novelist he is perhaps preoccupied to an unusual degree with the way in which a narrative is to be structured in order to penetrate through to its mysterious essence. In some of Conrad’s fiction the use of a narrative in the first person offered a solution. Conrad uses Marlow in this role on a number of occasions: in Heart of Darkness (1902) it is this character who links the ‘frame’ of the tale — the quotidian reality of the four men, united by the ‘bond of the sea’, who sit on the deck of a ship on the Thames waiting for the tide to turn — with the elusive, haunted nature of a narrative which describes Marlow’s confrontation with the darkness of the Congo — and with Kurtz. Even so, Marlow will sometimes break off from his account which deals with experience ‘on the stretch’, exasperated by the difficulty of communicating the essence of his story to listeners who are necessarily limited by the perpectives of everyday reality: ‘Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream… No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life sensation of any given epoch of one’s experience — that which makes its truth, its meaning — its subtle and penetrating essence.’