pre zen tare proiect literatura engleza

8/9/2019 Pre Zen Tare Proiect Literatura Engleza

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The Narrative Method


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Structurally Heart of Darkness is a framednarrative. It opens with the anonymous first narrator describing the tranquil Thames estuary which wouldprove to be an ironical antithesis to the Congo Basin,the setting of the inner narrative.

Unlike the traditional story which envelops itsmeaning as a nut- shell hides and protects the kernel,Marlows narrative is revealed to hold the meaningoutside , as a parable do, and keep the tale inside as a

component part of the meaning. This technique createsa new perspective upon the story which, instead of being a vehicle to carry meaning, is itself carried bythe meaning.


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The unnamed narrator expresses thehappening of the events through the maincharacter: Charlie Marlow. Because the story isin a frame style, it begins with Marlow and four men : the Director of Companies, the Lawyer, theAccountant and the unnamed narrator, whom is

the one that makes the introduction of the novel.By manipulating the reactions and thoughts

of Marlows audience , Conrad supplies anexample of how he would like his own audience

to react: listen to the story, slowly abandonrationalizations, engage in self-examinations,admit responsibility and understand that thedarkness is in each one of us.


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Marlows role


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Charlie Marlow is a well-seasoned seaman whocaptained a riverboat steamer up the Congo River into theheart of Africa and an introspective man which is served tothe reader in the form of the traditional hero-tough, honest

and a capable and independent thinker but he also appearsas a broken man, the world has defeated him in some way ,which also makes him sceptical, weary and cynical of theworld.


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Marlow is a man who loves exploring uncharted areas, buthe is transformed by his experience in Congo. He finds himself inthe expedition and learns that he is not truly a good person. Theenvironment causes Marlow to compromise with his values. Itwas like a trade and so Marlow had to make sacrifices for thewelfare of his crew.

He observed the greatest sin that a person can commit: theinhumanity to man the Africans were treated as a subsequentrace of the people, by the Europeans. They have been brutalizedanf forced to slavery for many years; they have also been

kidnapped for ransoms consisting of ivory or other goods.


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Marlow comes to admire Kurtz and vows to protecthis memory and the message he espouses, He is theone that meets Kurts Intended and tries to remove thepain caused by his death, that is why he lied about hislast words: The horror! The horror, and told her that hislast words was her name.

Like most of the characters in the novels, Marlowtries to please everyone, even the reader, giving him anacceptable happy ending.


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Marlow does describe the land of Congo asdarkness a lot, as the title Heart of Darkness implies, itis only the darkness of what once used to be for thewhite man. This darkness was put there to show their untrue belief of superiority to the black man becausethey were civilized and the blacks wereuncivilized like men in the dark ages.

The intention of the author expressed threwMarlow was to paint Africa as a place of hidden evil,savagery, and atrocious acts comitted by the whitecolonists against the natives of Africa.


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Self-descovery and self-knowledgein

Heart of Darkness


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Heart of Darkness is centrally concernedwith epistemological issues and above all, it is anarrative engaged with the possibilities of knowledgeabout the self and the world. Marlow himself acknowledges self discovery to be the mostimportant part of his journey.

Heart of Darkness offers a significant imagethat is as persistent as necessary to theinterpretation of Marlows self-discovery. The taleoffers a reaching towards a far distant point on thelimit of experience. Early in the story the framenarrator describes the Thames as a waterwayleading to the uttermost ends of the earth ( page 66)


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The movement of Heart of Darkness constructs one cycleof return: the action of the story begins in a civilized society of Europe, moves into the raw nature of Africa, goes into self-knowledge there, and returns to the civilized world. This cyclic

movement of return, though familiar and thereby easilyoverlooked, is quite significant relative to the problem of Marlow's self-discovery; it is the geographical movement of anaction which coincides with the inner flow of Marlow's natureand the pattern of self-knowledge.


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Emptiness is man's true self; it is also the ultimate realitywhich is beyond and yet embraces past, present, and future.This absolute present of emptiness, which coincides with the

special concept of the commingling of center and edge, bringsus to a significant fact that Marlow's whole story is nothing butthe events that take place in the absolute present of Marlow'sconsciousness. This is the reason why Marlow insists that heis trying to tell something like a "dream", in which past, present

and future blend into one another.And it explains how Marlow could see both the Intendedand Kurtz "in the same instant of time" (page 160) and see "her sorrow in the very moment of his death" (page 160). Timemeans the flow of consciousness, and past and future aremelted into present consciousness. Time overflows measures,and only eternal present exists in our consciousness in which"everything is," "all the past as well as all the future" (page168).


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When Marlow begins to speak, he describes theterminus of his voyage as the farthest point of [his]experience (page 70). In Africa he experiences something so real that he has never seen in his life page (135). AndI went a little farther, he said, then still a litlle farther- till

I had gone so far that I dont know how Ill ever get back(page134)


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Kurtz had passed "beyond the bounds of permittedaspiration" (page 139), but "the knowledge came to him at last- only at the very last" (page 138). And when Marlow visits theIntended, he hears "the whisper of a voice speaking frombeyond the threshold of an eternal darkness" (page 162).

This theme of "threshold" or "bounds" is veryimportant in the novel. "Threshold" in the story is a linebetween light and darkness, morality and immorality, beingand nothing, sanity and insanity, ego-self and no-self.


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Marlow, who "sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha (page 164) at the end of the story,symbolically represents the cosmic self which has attained thetrue self through the cycle of return and resides in the absolutepresent as well as in absolute space, in the truth stripped of its cloak of time" (page 168). Marlow is standing right " hereand now" prior to any form of duality such as before and after,time and eternity, center and edge, speaker and listener.


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In the tale's concluding image the frame narrator repeats his original linear space-time perception but nowentangles it within the figure that he has learned fromMarlow: "the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost

ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky -seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness"(page 164). To travel to " the uttermost ends of the earth" isto return to the center, and the flow of time is to go into theeternal present, " here and now" of " the sea of inexorabletime" (page 151), "the night of time" (page 67).


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Bibliography

Primary sources:Conrad, Joseph " Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer ,

New York: Signet Classic a division of Penguin Group,September, 1997

Secondary sources:Ciugureanu, Adina, Modernity and the idea of Modernity,Constanta, Ex Ponto, 2008

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