Dec 29, 2009

Heart of Darkness | Literary Qualities

Conrad uses a variety of techniques to advance his narrative and to imbue it, like a parable, with a quality of universality derived from specific experience. The technique of the narrative frame, while pervasive in the medieval tale-telling of such poets as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni Boccaccio, became in Conrad's hands a newly fashioned instrument that allowed the narrator to be a distant observer of events he had witnessed. As is the case in many of Conrad's works of fiction, Heart of Darkness is related by an anonymous narrator who identifies so strongly with Marlow that the...