in no uncertain terms.

In that sense, one could argue that the narrator of the frame story represents the opinion of the average Englishman—someone with an unthinking regard for the imperialist project, whose dark side remains unknown to him. That being the case, it is important to ease the reader into the story, drawing them gradually into the action instead of starting right in the middle of Marlow's steamboat journey up the Congo.

Instead, we start off on the calm, civilized Thames, which is where most of Conrad's readers would've felt right at home. Once they've been lulled into a familiar landscape, they can be drawn into a tale that becomes ever more disturbing as the story progresses.

Heart of Darkness is told in first-person point of view as a frame narrative. An unnamed narrator, a sailor like Marlowe conveys to us in written form the oral story that Marlowe tells a group of sailors on a ship on the Thames.

This technique allows the first narrator to characterize Marlowe as a Buddha-like storyteller and a sailor different from (except for liking to tell stories) and more contemplative than other sailors. Likening Marlowe to Buddha at both the beginning and end of the frame narrative lends Marlowe a sense of spiritual authority that he might not otherwise have had and helps us to understand Marlowe as a person who is mystical and set apart.

However, a frame narrative adds another layer to a story: we are hearing someone's account of Marlowe's account, which puts more distance between the reader and the original narrative. There is every possibility that the narrator has—without meaning to—changed, misremembered, or in other ways distorted the story in the retelling, which almost always happens. This lends a more mythic quality to Marlowe's tale.

At the same time, we get the strong sense that the narrator has caught the cadences of Marlowe's voice and thought. He captures the vivid details of Marlowe's sensory descriptions of Africa in a way that put us into the scene and help us to feel the atmosphere of the Congo as if we are there.

The narrative technique used in "Heart of Darkness", is one of a story within a story.  Although the primary narrator is Marlow,  there is a second narrator, unnamed, who tells us about Marlow telling his story.  There is also a third voice added to this narration which can be considered the author himself, who is really telling the whole story.

"Beyond these three dominant points of view are the individual viewpoints of the book's major characters. Each has a different perspective on Kurtz. These perspectives are often conflicting and are always open to a variety of interpretations."

Joseph Conrad uses a framing device to set up the story that Marlow will tell. The narrator is a fellow traveler or boatman aboard the Nellie; the author never gives this person's name.

Using this type of frame has several effects. It establishes the basic orality of the narrative. There is no indication that Marlow has written out his story for others to read; rather, he is telling a tale to which the others are listening.

Positioning Marlow as a yarn-spinner also adds an element of uncertainty: is he relating his story truthfully, or is he exaggerating or downright lying to create an effect for his audience? Did the events he mentions happen as he presents them—or at all? Did Kurtz even exist?

Using a narrator also adds a filter. The reader must rely on the narrator's word that he is repeating what Marlow told him.

While the central story of Heart of Darkness is told by Marlow, a long-time sailor, it is in the form of an anecdote told to an unnamed Narrator, who frames the story with their voyage on the Nellie, a cruising yawl sailing down the Thames River in England. The narrator has little to do with the story itself, aside from being the person who relates it to the reader.

Between us there was, as I have already said somewhere, the bond of the sea. Besides holding our hearts together through long periods of separation, it had the effect of making us tolerant of each other's yarns—and even convictions.
(Conrad, Heart of Darkness, eNotes eText)

The Narrator does not interrupt the story, but listens and understands without judging Marlow's actions. His listening mimics that of the Reader, who sees the story through two layers of disconnect: Marlow to the narrator, and the narrator to the Reader. Despite this, the Narrator is changed by the story, looking out over the river and seeing not the comfortable water of his experience but a "heart of an immense darkness."

Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a frame narrative, beginning from the view of an unnamed sailor on the Thames and taking us into the deep Congo in Africa through Marlow’s eyes, then back to the Thames as Marlow concludes his tale. The civilized frame of the Nellie serves to highlight the contrasts between this sailing vessel and Marlow’s Belgian-owned riverboat, which is ill-performing and in severe disrepair.

The frame narrative also provides the reader with a considerable distance from the immediate effects of imperialism. Conquering and being conquered is a subject of lazy musing in the first few pages of the novel, and the unnamed sailor thinks patriotically of knights and men like Francis Drake and their discoveries. This is later juxtaposed with Marlow’s face-to-face encounter with Kurtz, a European who has gone insane after a long stay in the jungle, and whose downward spiral is emblematic of man’s universal savagery once the confines of civilization are gone.

These contrasts of the wildness of the Congo and the relative peace of civilization are possible through the use of this framing element. Of course, how much did Marlow really tell the narrator, and how much did the narrator remember? Beyond questions of morality and civilization, Conrad also tests our trust in the conventions of narration. We’re left with the question of how much Marlow really remembered, since he is telling this story some time later--were his feelings of his experience or his memory altered by the Congo, or did he make it out untouched by whatever destroyed Mr. Kurtz?

The main narrative structure in Joseph Conrad'sHeart of Darkness is that of the frame story, or the story told with an external "frame" that puts it in context and allows a separate view. This is commonly used in film to show flashbacks and other points of view; two films with this structure are Double Indemnity (1944) and Haywire (2011).

The frame story allows the unnamed "real" narrator to present Marlow's story from his own recollection. In the first part of the story, the narrator describes Marlow, who has unexpectedly spoken:

...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.

His remark did not seem at all surprising. It was just like Marlow. It was accepted in silence. No one took the trouble to grunt even; and presently he said, very slow--

"I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here..."
(Conrad, Heart of Darkness, eNotes eText)

This allows the narrator two levels of disconnect between the tale of Kurtz and its telling; he does not have Marlow's intimate view, but can see the outward discomfort that the telling has. This also allows the "unreliable narrator" to come through, as the narrator makes no effort to comment or fact-check Marlow's story, and so the reader has no idea how much Marlow is adding, embellishing, or diminishing.

The narrative mode is called a frame technique because it's a story within a story. Marqi is correct in that one of the guests on board the Nellie begins the novel; he describes the others on the ship and introduces us to Marlow, who is the primary narrator of the story. Most of Heart of Darkness, then, is told from his perspective as he recounts his experiences to his friends. Several times in the course of his narrative, he pauses or is interrupted by someone, just to remind the reader that Marlow has an audience. The novel ends with the same narrator that opens it, thus "framing" Marlow's story.

This mode is called a "frame" story, meaning that there is a story within a story being told. A narrator relates the events that frame Marlow's story, which is about a group of men sitting on a boat on the Thames telling tales of their travels. Then the narrator introduces Marlow's story, which is told in first person by Marlow, filtered through the unknown narrator. Does this make a difference in Marlow's tale? Has the narrator reported Marlow's first person account faithfully and completely?  Does it make a difference to Marlow's story that Marlow's audience is a group of experienced men of the sea?  Conrad made a deliberate choice in telling his tale as a frame story, and you will want to consider what effect this has on the tale. 

Concerning the narrative mode in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," the enotes Study Guide on the work says the following:

Point of View
Heart of Darkness is framed as a story within a story. The point of view belongs primarily to Charlie Marlow, who delivers the bulk of the narrative, but Marlow's point of view is in turn framed by that of an unnamed narrator who provides a first-person description of Marlow telling his story. The point of view can also be seen in a third consciousness in the book, that of Conrad himself, who tells the entire tale to the reader, deciding as author which details to put in and which to leave out. Beyond these three dominant points of view are the individual viewpoints of the book's major characters. Each has a different perspective on Kurtz. These perspectives are often conflicting and are always open to a variety of interpretations. Whose point of view is to be trusted? Which narrator and which character is reliable? Conrad leaves these questions to the reader to answer, accounting for the book's complexity and multilayered meanings.

The work is a frame story, then, in which the setting serves as the vehicle by which stories are told.  Rather than a single narrator telling the story, the story is told by characters within the story.  This leads to the "complexity and multilayered meanings," which, of course, lead to much discussion and analysis. 

By the way, if you need a comparison, Chaucer also uses this technique in The Canterbury Tales.

Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad, is told in the first person narrative. That means the story is told by one character or speaker (the narrator) who refers to himself/herself using the first person pronouns "I "(singular) or "we" (plural). This form of narration lends itself well to exciting, action-filled stories like this novel because a sense of realism is conveyed - the narrator was actually there. The narrator is involved in the action, as opposed to third person narrative, where the narrator reports on what happened in an impersonal way ("he" did this, "they" did that, not "I" did this).

The main character and the narrator in Heart of Darkness, is Marlow, a sailor who is sent on a voyage down the Congo to find a man named Kurtz, a legendary and mysterious ivory trader. The novel is sometimes called a story within a story because many things happen within the main story of searching for "Mista Kurtz."

There are indeed two narrators in Heart of Darkness. First of all, there is the narrator of the frame story which introduces us to Marlow. This is told by a sailor aboard Marlow's ship, the Nellie, as it lies moored on the River Thames. Then of course we have Marlow himself, who proceeds to tell the other passengers the astonishing tale of his adventures in Africa.

The main reason why Conrad uses two narrators in this way is to highlight one of the book's most important themes: the contrast between savagery and civilization. The Nellie is a humble merchant ship; it is certainly not the kind of vessel that one would expect to see making its way up the Congo into the eponymous heart of darkness. It is safely moored on the Thames in the heart of Southern England and is as far removed as it's possible to be from the harsh reality of life in the Empire.

This serves to make Marlow's extraordinary story all the more exotic and fantastical. But it also allows the unnamed frame story narrator and the other passengers to maintain a distance between themselves and what Marlow's story reveals about the sordid realities of life in the Empire.

The narration style is a frame-story structure, with an unnamed narrator explaining Marlow's story as it was related to him. The narrator makes no outside judgement on the events of the story, only interrupting the tale on occasion. The effect of this narrative style is to separate the reader from the worse brutalities of Kurtz and the jungle, and to allow a more objective view of the people and events that Marlow encounters. Marlow's opinions are not the narrator's opinions; instead, Marlow is given the status of both unreliable narrator -- as he was so affected by Kurtz that he cannot speak of him objectively -- and of audience surrogate with his detailed, emotional descriptions. The story also has two chapter breaks in seemingly arbitrary places; these were a function of the story's publication in serial form.

This novel uses a "frame" to tell the story. What does that mean? It means that there is a story within a story.  We have the story of the men all sitting around reminscing, plus the story of the journey upriver, narrated in the first person by Marlow, but being told to this group of men. As Marlow speaks, the reader does not know who is relating what he says.  All we know is that the person who is telling us the story of Marlow telling the story is in this group of men.  This means that we are learning about the setting from the unknown narrator and learning about Marlow's journey filtered through the eyes and ears of the unknown narrator. 

Does this narrative device affect your reading of the story? This is a question that you might want to address in your "note."  Is the unknown narrator reliable? Does he accurately set forth what Marlow has to say?  Furthermore, you might want to think about whether Marlow is reliable.

The narrative technique is a simple one in that first person narration is used. The technique is a complex one in that there is a narration within a narration as the frame narrator retells the story that was told to him by Marlowe. Thus there are two settings, two chronological sequences and two narrators. Additionally, the chronology turns backward on itself through flashbacks from time to time depending upon which narrator is speaking of which period of time when.

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad examines a terrifying view of life presented by an English traveler to Africa. As the novella begins, there is an anonymous narrator whose purpose appears to be only the introduction of the actual narrator of the story, Charles Marlow:

Marlow sat cross-legged right aft, leaning against the mizzen-mast. He had sunken cheeks, a yellow complexion, a straight back, an ascetic aspect, and, with his arms dropped, the palms of hands outwards, resembled an idol.

Marlow is the narrator of the story and tells of his past adventures in the Congo and how he enlightened his soul through his experiences. His perspective is really that of the author who published the novel in 1902. Conrad uses Marlow to show his readers how the characterization of Africa in his era as the “dark continent” is an inaccurate and naïve representation of reality.

As the plot unfolds, Conrad’s point of view as expressed through Marlow’s narration strongly influences the perspective of the reader. He demonstrates how the continent thought to be occupied solely by primitive natives using demonic rituals to conjure up the forces of evil is a viewpoint adopted only by ignorant people. Instead, the “darkness” of the continent was the result of European greed and ambition. The treatment of the native people as “inhuman” was the real evil.

Marlow’s condemnation of the cruel exploitation of the sick and dying people of the Congo by Belgian Europeans in their zeal for wealth through colonialism is clear. On the surface, the “heart of darkness” is portrayed as the harsh treatment and awful living conditions suffered by the native people of Africa. Narrator Marlow concludes that the darkness lies not in the geography of the region, nor in the native culture. It resides in the hearts of men. Readers come away from this novella influenced by the narrator’s point of view that imperialism is the true detestable evil.