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Heart Of Darkness White Lies

Heart of Darkness: White Lies
Joseph Conrad's slender volume Heart of Darkness, published serially in Blackwood's Magazine in
1899, has probably received more critical attention per page than any other prose work. Layer
after layer has been examined and analysed, and continually they seem to lead on to
increasingly abstract strata. Critics have demonstrated how Marlow, fundamentally unreliable
and partial in his capacity of first-person narrator, becomes involved in the action and is
gradually changed by the events he describes. Using time-shifts and varying vantage points, he
takes the puzzled readers as well as the listeners on board the Nellie along the borderlines of
consciousness and reality. Like the narrator, we are allowed to "peep over the edge" into the
dark abyss, as it were, but still the novel teases like a dream, contradictory and intriguing.
According to E. M. Forster, among others, Conrad's obscurity mediates a kind of double vision
caused by discrepancies between his nearer and his further vision: "What is so elusive about
him is that he is always promising to make some general philosophic statement about the
universe, and then refraining with a gruff disclaimer" (Forster, 134-5).
The novel, concluding
with Marlow's lie to the Intended, is expressive of a sense of utter disillusionment, in stark
contrast with nineteenth-century historians' optimistic view of humanity continually moving
towards full understanding. In Conrad's book, paradoxically, ultimate truth is expressed
through a lie. In keeping with the ambience of fin de si3cle, on psychological, social and
religious reading levels the storyline heads towards "the end" in the sense of ultimate darkness,
a condition of meaninglessness and nihilism, negating all civilized values.
Part of the puzzlement which has been felt about this story has come about as a result
of dividing it into a series of interrelated layers, and the fact that in the first half of the book
there is...