Narrative Technique in Joseph Conrad’s“Heart of Darkness”

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is not simply a tale of imperial adventure; it is a selfreflexive deconstruction of narrative authority. The paper examines the novel's narrative strategies in terms of Marlow's unreliability as a narrator, the disorienting use of nonchronological narrative and the recursive frame narrative organizing the reader's experience. Close narratological analysis examines the ways in which Conrad subverts traditional storytelling in order to reflect the psychological and ideological fragmentation underlying imperialism. Relying on the scholarship of scholars such as Watt (1979), Achebe (1977), and Guerard (1958), the paper contends that both The Great Gatsby and Heart of Darkness use narrative unreliability to unmask cultural myths and that the novel's formal innovations are put into context through comparison with The Great Gatsby. The paper concludes that Conrad's manipulation of narrative form is not so much a stylistic issue but a philosophical inquiry into the very act of storytelling.