una tesina di M. Bortolotti |
| Commentary The main story of Heart of Darkness is encompassed in a framing story told by an unnamed narrator about how Marlow told his story to a group of men on a boat on the Thames estuary. Thus, Heart of Darkness is on one level the story of the telling of a story. And here begins Conrad's game of puzzling with memories and fantasy. The theme of communication and speech is an important one to Heart of Darkness, making the framing story an important aspect of the novel. The question of the reliability of sources comes up again and again in the book, and Marlow is isn't exempt from suspicion. No one except Marlow is named in the framing story; like many other characters in the book, they are identified only by their jobs (accountant, lawyer, etc.) In the framing story, this gives them an aura of being somehow symbolic, as their identity comes from their position in society.
It also introduces the closely related theme of light versus dark,
and white versus black. Light and dark have traditionally represented good and evil
respectively, and civilization has generally been viewed as good while
savagery has normally been seen as evil (with extremely notable
exceptions, of course). So the city, the symbol of civilization, always forms a contrast with its
surroundings, instead of as some great symbol of light and culture. Marlow's tale has no clear meaning, even to him, and he struggles throughout to decipher some meaning in his experiences. This influences his method of discourse, which is sometimes disjointed and tangential, as one thought leads to another without strict regard to chronology. Marlow describes his journey on several occasions as one of self-discovery. His narrative has a certain
dreamlike quality about it, and his story and its individual components possess an importance that lies hidden beneath the
surface. Marlow hesitates before embarking on his journey and has the strange feeling that he's
going at the center of a continent, but at the center of the earth. In the end,
it becomes apparent that his real journey has been to the center of the
human spirit.
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