| Captain Singleton is another important realistic novel written by Daniel Defoe.It narrates Singleton’s legendary overseas adventures in the form of autobiography.Heart of Darkness is one of Conrad’s classical works.Marlowe,the protagonist,travels to Africa by steamer on the Congo River and goes to the inner station to save the sick Kurtz.Two works bear the traces of colonialism’s ideology and share similarities in narrative techniques of colonial writing.Based on the post-colonial discourse,this thesis focuses on the character,plot structure and narrative mode in two works and takes the comparison as the research method to investigate the Conrad’s inheritance and innovation to Defoe’s Captain Singleton.The first three chapters introduce the research methods,significance,outlines and the controlling assumption of the study.The main body of his paper is divided into three parts.Chapter Four takes two groups of characters,Singleton and Marlowe,William and Kurtz,to detect the similarity and difference of the characters in the two novels by the way of characterization and its effect.After the comparison,it can be found that “adventure hero” is the universal image in colonial wiring,which presents Conrad’s inheritance to Defoe.While the self-dubious Marlow and Kurtz’s “atavism” project Conrad’s innovation.Chapter five selects the plot structure and the factors of plot development to examine the similarities and differences.“Voyage and Return” is the prototypical pattern of two texts,which shows Conrad’s acceptance of Defoe.Kurtz’s “failure to return to Europe” reflects Conrad’s innovation.Chapter six analyses the similarities and differences of narrative modes from point of view and narrative time(tense).“I” narrator and “we” narrator are the important techniques to promote colonizer’s purposes,while the “ ‘I’ as witness”,the larger signifying scope of“we”,different narrative speed and events narrated disorderly in Heart of Darkness presentConrad’s innovation.In conclusion,this thesis holds that there is a “family resemblance” between Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to Defoe’s Captain Singleton in the aspects of character,plot structure and narrative mode.Conrad may inherit Defoe’s colonial writing conventions,which proves that there is an organic continuity between the early imperial narrative and the later imperial narrative.Captain Singleton provides abundant discourse resources for the construction of the image of the early British Empire and illustrates its pioneering contribution to literature indirectly.This thesis is helpful to re-evaluate Defoe’s Captain Singleton and gives some clues to trace the changes of colonial writing. |
