Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad
THE NOVEL
OTHER ELEMENTS
FORM AND STRUCTURE
Heart of Darkness is structured as a journey of discovery, both externally in the jungle, and internally
in Marlow's own mind. The deeper he penetrates into the heart of the jungle, the deeper he delves within
himself; by the climax, when Kurtz has been revealed for the disgrace he is, Marlow has also learned
something about himself. And he returns to civilization with this new knowledge.
Formally, Heart of Darkness looks forward to many of the developments of the modern novel- most
notably the fracturing of time. Marlow doesn't tell his tale straight through from beginning to end; he'll
skip from an early event to a late event and back again. Thus, we get several pages about Kurtz- Marlow's
impressions and evaluation of his behavior- close to the end of Chapter II, but Kurtz himself doesn't
appear on the scene until some way into Chapter III. Nor would a typical 19th-century narrator interrupt
a buildup of suspense like the depiction of the boat waiting to be attacked in the fog with a lengthy
digression on cannibalism and self-restraint. But Marlow does. He's describing the fog and the fright of
the white pilgrims on board, which leads him to recall the reactions of the black Africans on board, and
suddenly he's off on a tangent about cannibalism that brings the development of the action to a complete
halt. In a more traditional novel this passage would have been reserved for a more appropriate place, for
example, when the author first introduced the cannibals. But Marlow imparts his thoughts as they occur to
him. Conrad was trying to find a form that more closely followed the contours of human thought- a less
artificial form than the traditional novel. (Later novelists notably James Joyce and William Faulkner, took
these experiments with fractured time and space much further.) Hence the forward and backward leaps,
the interruptions, the thoughts left dangling.
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