such a thing. But the subsequent contributions by this first voice become briefer and more perfunctory. It doesn't take long for us to recognize that Marlow's narration is really the only thing that matters. It is mostly at significant junctures that a brief interruption of Marlow's story occurs. Marlow struggles to give a picture ofKurtz to his auditors, and he makes the crucial point that everything about Kurtz conveys the quality of a dream. And then, the first voice returns to say,

He [Marlow] was silent for a while.

Marlow resumes, and a longer interruption comments on the darkness surrounding the men and observes that there was

a faint uneasiness inspired by this narrative that seemed to shape itself without human lips in the heavy night-air of the river.

But even the start of a new chapter is simply a continuation of Marlow's narrative without a break, lacking any commentary at all from the first narrator. Why is this?

Obviously Conrad wishes to give, even more emphatically than before, the impression that at this point, the story is entirely Marlow's to tell. The same is true of the transition from chapter 2 to 3. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that at the end of the tale the first voice returns, only for a concluding paragraph which really does little to sum up or contextualize Marlow's narrative beyond the reference to the title. It tells us that the tranquil waterway

seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.

This is not to say that the first or "outer" narrator is unimportant. He does in fact provide us with the background information about Marlow, without which the reader would find the events described to be even more mysterious and puzzling than they are (and are intended to be). The question remains as to whether Conrad is simply using the convention of one narration within another as a standard device to provide greater verisimilitude, or whether it is a thematic feature of the baffling and lurid tale presented here. Probably it is both.

Though the interplay between the two narrators isn't especially significant in itself, it does anchor the story in a kind of reality that would be less secure if it were only Marlow we were listening to. Somehow, the presence of the other voice adds credibility to Marlow. And yet we still cannot know, of course, how reliable Marlow himself is. At the heart of his story is an ambiguity as to the specifics, the details, of Kurtz's descent into madness, summed up in the famous cry, "The horror!"

The transitions between narrators Conrad provides to us don't seem to do anything to clear up or dispel this ambiguity. But perhaps the lack of absolute clarity, and the equivocal nature of the strange tale, are the features that make Heart of Darkness in the end so striking and memorable.

The use of a first-person narrator frequently brings to light the question of reliability. Surely we as readers assume that a third-person narrator is reliable, for there's little reason for an author to misrepresent the events of the story. Yet, with a first-person narrator, authors often intentionally give biased, skewed, or otherwise bogus representations of events. In Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the readers have to deal not with one narrator, but two. The novella begins with a first-person account by an unnamed narrator who is on a boat with several others. One of the men, Charlie Marlow, begins to entertain the others with a long, meandering story about a previous seafaring excursion. The novel reads, "No one took the trouble to grunt even; and presently he said, very slow: 'I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans came here...' " (20).

From here, Conrad makes certain to keep the readers aware that the following is coming from Marlow; he begins each line with the proper quotation mark, stylistically showing that the unnamed narrator is still truly the one telling the tale. He's recollecting a recollection, which further alienates the audience and further draws into question the idea of reliability. Marlow often takes brief breaks in the story, where the narrator will tell of one of Marlow's traits.

As the novella progresses, Conrad's structure becomes even more complex as Marlow begins relate dialogue between him and other characters. The narrator seems skeptical of Marlow's tale, and as readers, it becomes difficult not to be skeptical of the narrator's tale as well.

The shifts in narrative are because this is a story within a story, sometimes called a "frame" story because the primary story "frames" the secondary story. 

As Heart of Darkness begins, Marlow is sitting on a boat called a "yawl," clearly a sailboat since he refers to the sails.  The narrator describes to the reader the men around him, the "Director of Companies, who is the captain, and "four others," who include Marlow and the narrator himself. Then Marlow speaks:

And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth (67).

At this point, the narrator is telling the reader what Marlow says.  Then the narrator takes over again, telling us about the men's responses.  When Marlow speaks next, the narrator is still telling the story. 

Finally, Marlow begins the story within the story on page 70.  Now we have the narrator telling the reader what Marlow is telling the men.  I believe it is not until page 95 that Marlow stops his tale and the narrator pulls us back to the setting around Marlow, when the narrator says, "He was silent for a while." It is Marlow he is describing. Marlow resumes his story again and has "the last word" on page 99, when the story ends. (I have provided page citations to an on-line version of the story, and the link for that version is below.) 

What effect do you think it has on the reader to hear Marlow's story "filtered" through the narrator?  Do you think the narrator is reliable?  Remember, no one had a tape recorder in those days!