Heart of Darkness – Narrative Ambiguity and Imperialist Anxieties in the Joseph Conrad Novel
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a novel preoccupied with the concept of ’empire’. It also has a rather problematic relationship with the realist aesthetic which was the predominant nineteenth-century literary mode. This article aims to place Conrad’s novel within an imperialist context, assessing some of the underlying fears, such as hidden facets of the individual psyche, which, to a varying degree, appear to have informed its narrative. The article also considers genre issues and narrative structure, revealing some of the literary influences and stylistic techniques which characterize the novel.
Perhaps one of the greatest changes to fiction of the late nineteenth-century was the emergence of narrative ambiguity. This is apparent in Heart of Darkness with the outcome of Marlow’s quest for Kurtz being anticlimactic and ambiguous.
In terms of genre, Conrad’s novel could be regarded as adopting certain Gothic techniques. Perhaps most notable of these being the exotic settings: the Congo and African jungle. Whereas in the late eighteenth-century, Southern Europe was regarded as an alien and exotic region by most English readers, by the following century, the nation’s literary gaze had shifted to Africa – the ‘dark continent’.
A superficial reading of the novel might regard it as belonging to the popular boy’s own adventures and imperialist tales with the author’s maritime experiences providing authentic narrative detail. Heart of Darkness could also be thought to have a more distant literary antecedent in that of the medieval quest-romance. The figure of Marlow travelling upriver in search of Kurtz echoes …