Relationship between Narrative and Meaning in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad presents his reader with a partly autobiographical story that stands as a criticism of modern European imperialism with its narrative, symbolism, and characters. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many European countries, primarily Britain, France, and Belgium, in whose territory the story takes place, invaded African lands, took native people as their slaves and got hold of their resources and properties through companies and corporations that made the trade of these. According to the information taken from the website of the University of Oregon, "By the nineteenth century, imperialism was defended as being in the interest of the periphery. In different forms, Metropol/periphery relationships were frequently described as a bountiful superior civilization bestowing its blessings on a needy inferior". This idea led many people to believe that imposing imperialism on Africans was their right. Thus, the violent ways of European companies and corporations were either justified by the people or hidden from them through vows of secrecy. Some people, however, such as Joseph Conrad, witnessed the brutality. Conrad had lived as a seaman for many years of his life, through which he collected enough material for his writings. One of these materials was from his travels to the Belgian Congo. In various ways, Conrad transferred his memories and knowledge, as well as his critique of what was happening in Congo, in various ways in his book, Heart of Darkness. He used framed narrative as one of his tools. Conrad’s narrative plays a role in his aim of criticizing European colonialism in Africa through the characters carrying European ideals and identity by decreasing the reliability of the narrators of Heart of Darkness.

The narrator of the story is one of the seamen whom Marlow tells the memory of his first time as a sailor. Thus, the original story is transferred to the reader through layers. These layers make the reader consider the reliability of the text while reading it because what is said may be altered while it is told, even by one person, and seeing it transmitted by a narrator who listened to it from another person makes it questionable whether it is true or not, and also leaves many gaps for the reader to fill. In this process, the reader fills in the gaps according to his or her account. Thus, the core of the story changes more and more. The narrator states this for the reader to understand it by using Marlow as a subject in defining it in the following quote:

The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine. (Conrad 8)

According to the quote, Marlow thinks that the meaning of a story is not at the core of it but at its shell. When we take the "kernel" as the main part of a story, the "shell" can be considered as the storyteller. How much of the kernel you can see depends on how much of the shell you can break, and how easily you can see it depends on the hardness of the shell. Like this, how much of a story you can reach depends on the narrator’s identity, nation, race, gender, and ideals. When the shell is considered as also the narrator, the same things can be stated. So, in the case of European colonialism in the 19th and 20th centuries, what made it just in people’s eyes was the shell. Europeans knew what they were told, and what they were told was that they were superior to black people, had to teach them civilization, and had the right to use them to feed that civilization. Naturally, the core of the story changed a lot, mostly because people heard the stories from other people from ear to ear. By using layered narrative in the book and giving hints of how much a story can be changed by different factors, Conrad aims to show the reader that a story may not be fully correct.

At the beginning of the book, Kurtz’s name is mentioned as if it were from a legend. People from the company liked and admired Kurtz because he did his job well and was a good European with a good past. Towards the end, however, he loses their favor. He is seen as a betrayer because he wanted to keep the ivory to himself and broke the policy of the company. His image in Europe could be easily broken if what he did and how he died were spread in Europe, but it was protected by Marlow with a lie about what he did in Congo and what he said before dying, even though he hated lies (Conrad 38–39). His lie to Kurtz’s fiancée changes everything he witnessed about Kurtz, and because she and no other person know about it, they can only know what Marlow told them. According to "Narrative, Identity, Solidarity: Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim" by Jakob Lothe "[…] Conrad's concerns with cognition, with narrative communication, with artistic issues, and with reaching and relating to his audience were for him not just aesthetic but also moral and philosophical concerns" (149). That is, Conrad does not use literary tools in vain. He aims at transferring a moral or philosophical subtext. He creates a situation similar to the one described above with the narrative he chose for Heart of Darkness. Just as Kurtz's fiancée can't know more than the lie Marlow told her, the reader can't know more than what the story's narrator tells him/her, and Europeans can't know more than what people who've been to Congo tell them.

Shortly, as a man who saw what happened in Congo and as a writer who uses literary tools and his stories as utensils to narrate "moral and philosophical concerns," Conrad, with his narrative and the supporting situations he uses in the story, aims to show the contemporary reader that with what they are told they might not know the whole truth because the teller might change the story according to his point of view to hide and protect something voluntarily or involuntarily.