A Deconstructive Study On Discourse And Narrative Line Of Heart Of Darkness

Polish-born English novelist Joseph Conrad was regarded as one of the greatest novelist in the English language. When he was just eleven years old, Conrad became a small Polish orphan. He left his hometown and worked as a seaman at the age of sixteen. In the next twenty years, he traveled around the world. The sea was Conrad's both career and love. Many of his works drew upon his sea experience. In 1890 Conrad contracted to become captain of a Congo River steamer, but the six months he spent in Africa led only to disillusionment and ill health, giving him the background for his masterpiece, Heart of Darkness.The story details an incident when Marlow, an Englishman, took a foreign assignment as a ferry-boat captain, employed by a Belgian trading company. Since its publication in 1899, Joseph Conrad's novella, Heart of Darkness, is widely regarded as a significant work of English literature and becomes part of the Western canon. Critics at home and abroad make various researches on this novella with the theory of formalism, feminism, post-colonialism, racialism, etc.Conrad's narrative style is very striking. In Heart of Darkness, he shatters the classic narration tradition and uses complicated narration techniques. This paper is trying to discuss on the story and discourse, and narrative line of the novella with some deconstruction theories, in order to find out some narration characteristic in it. This paper first analyzes story and discourse of this novella, and discusses Hawthorn and other critics'view of"covert plot". It believes that Hawthorn's analyses casts some light on the narrative techniques about story and discourse; in fact, it's really hard to distinguish one from the other in this novella. Concerning the narrative line of Heart of Darkness, this paper discusses the multiplicity of its beginning, middle and end; and compare them to Aristotle's the law of causality, the law of temporality, and the law of unity in his famous Poetics. Then, duality and multiplicity of narrative line in Heart of Darkness are discussed in the way of connecting this novella with Inferno, Pilgrim's Progress and Paradise Lost.