The Limits of Narrative in in Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness Essay

The Limits of Narrative in philia of Darkness Early English novelists depicted a very general literality that is, what many observed to be real is what found its flair into the narratives. For example, several novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries emphasize, or entirely revolve around, the mentation of accessible status. Samuel Richardsons Pamela addresses a servants dilemma between her morals and low social position the hero of Henry Fieldings Tom Jones must also demonstrate his low birth. Jane Austen famously portrayed class struggles in nearly all one of her novels. These texts all represented the universe of discourse at its face the actions of the characters radius for their reality, and the narrator was simply the descriptor of these events. The novels conformed to a very narrow world-view, peculiar(a) by popular thought. True, there was much to explore within this confinement, as shown by the range of commentary in the texts. Still, as storie s they could only contribute what society observed a kind of reality by consensus. As Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness demonstrates, modernism rejected the aims and methods of realism, and claimed the inner self represented the real more closely than the public world. Furthermore, realism appeared to represent the world wholly and concisely. Conrads novel rejects this, and instead exposes the failure of language to describe a complete reality. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow himself is incomplete, and so is his narrative. He is forced into imprecise language, resigned to using negative modifiers and repeating inexact words. He struggles to tell his fabrication satisfactorily, and by his own admission, his telling is deficient. The limitation of language, then, becomes the focus of t... ...e rejection of nineteenth nose candy realism. Since Marlow the storyteller is flawed, his story falters as a result. The novel effectively reduces to each one to their flaws, but does not attempt to hide its limitations behind a manufacture authority. It is this absence, or seeming absence, of controlled writing that brings Heart of Darkness closer to the real than any authoritative work of realism. Works Cited Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. 1902. impertinent York Dover, 1990. Erdinast-Vulcan, Daphna. The unsung Short Fiction of Joseph Conrad. Oxford Oxford University Press, 1999. 78-108. Greaney, Michael. Conrad, Language, and Narrative. Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 2002. 57-76. Hawthorn, Jeremy. Studying the Novel. 4th ed. London Arnold, 2001. 60-61 Leavis, F.R. The Great Tradition. New York Stewart, 1950. 173-82.