Commentaries of others authors about the narrator
Ian Watt has suggested that Heart of Darkness embodies more thoroughly than any previous fiction the posture thoroughly than any previous fiction the posture of uncertainty and doubt. Not only does it use oblique narration to produce an open-ended fiction, but epistemological doubts are expressed through the device which Watt has called "delayed decoding". The narrative presents the character's immediate sensations, only to open up a gap between impression and to foreground the process of interpretation.
Peter Brooks has similarly explored Heart of Darkness's uncertainties from a narratological perspective. Where the classic framed tale produced a set of nested boxes, of brackets within brackets, Marlow's narrative plot steadily takes as its story what Marlow understands to be Kurtz's story, but Kurtz's story "never fully exists, never fully gets itself told". Marlow's journey back to origins promises to gain its meaning from its attachment to Kurtz's prior journey, but Kurtz's articulation at what Marlow identifies as "the farthest point of navigation and the culminating point of my experience" is "a blurted emotional reaction of uncertain reference and context" which "makes a mockery of story-telling and ethics". After Marlow has retraced Kurtz's journey up-river through the stories of other quests and journeys, Kurtz's own story is at last conveyed to Marlow in a non-narrated way, "in desolate exclamations, completed by shrugs, in interrupted phrases, in hints ending in deep sighs". It becomes one among a series of possible plots, of alternative signifying systems, that offer to explain reality "if only one could believe them". In the end Marlow's own narrative arrives only at the suggestion of a motive for its own telling: as if the conventional narrative ending he supplies in Brussels has condemned him to the guilty unconventional narration he produces on the Thames.(20)
(20) ã Heart of Darkness with the Congo Diary
Introduction and Notes ã Robert Hampson, 1995
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England.
Pages: 26 and 27.
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Creada: 22/02/2000 Última Actualización: 11/03/2000