Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad

OTHER ELEMENTS
POINT OF VIEW

Marlow is clearly Conrad's alter ego; his opinions don't differ significantly from what we know about the author's own. But Marlow has tremendous importance as a literary device. By using an actual speaking sailor to tell the story, Conrad goes just about as far away as you can get from the typical 19th- century novel's omniscient narrator- the all-knowing voice of an impersonal author who told you not only what happened to the characters but also what went on in their minds. We're never allowed to know more than Marlow himself, and Marlow knows only what he perceives through his senses. Thus, we're never directly told what motivated, say, the manager or Kurtz. Instead, we get Marlow's speculations on what their motivations might have been.

What's most unusual about the point of view in Heart of Darkness isn't the use of Marlow as narrator, but that his tale is framed by the narration of another, nameless observer. As a result, Marlow's whole story appears somewhat cumbersomely enclosed in quotation marks. Why couldn't Conrad just make Marlow the primary narrator and drop the nameless voice at the beginning and the end?

One reason is that by having Marlow in front of us on the cruising yawl Nellie, we feel the immediacy of his speaking voice, we get the actual sensation of a crusty sailor spinning a yarn before us. If Conrad had written the whole novel in the first person, dispensing with the primary narrator, he'd have ended up with a more "writerly" book, in which Marlow's hesitations and digressions- which are such an important element in the style- would have no place. We would also miss the feeling that Marlow was working out the meaning of his tale as he went along, and that we were a part of that process. A writer, unlike a talker, usually has things worked out beforehand.

The meaning of the novel lies not only in what happened in Africa, but also in Marlow's conviction that he has to tell others about these events as a kind of warning. The representative Victorians aboard the Nellie need to be told about the threat of the darkness, the threat to progress and enlightenment, because for the most part the Victorian world hadn't acknowledged that threat. By putting his audience, especially the primary narrator, on the deck of the Nellie with Marlow, Conrad emphasizes this warning aspect of Marlow's tale- and its effect on his listeners.

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