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Student Number: C1101917

Module Number: SE2443
Module Title: Modernist Fictions
Question Number and Title: Write an essay on narrative technique (e.g.: Narrative
voice; free indirect discourse; stream of consciousness narrative with references in
two fictions on this module.

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Joseph Conrads two novels, Heart Of Darkness and The Nigger of the Narcissus both
share unique versions of narrative voice. In the Nigger of the Narcissus The
narrating voice varies across the novel, describing the action now from without and
now from within. The narrating is shared between a detached, third-person,
omniscient narrator and a first-person narrator who is one of the crew.1 The book is a
based on a version of Conrads experience upon the sailing vessel, The Narcissus that
sailed from: Bombay in April 1864 and voyaged south past the Cape of Good Hope,
reaching Dunkirk on 16 October.2 Conrad therefore draws from his own experience
and uses the narrator as a vessel for his own views and experience. Conrad makes the
clear distinction by juxtaposing the third person narrator who refers to the crew as
they with the first person narrator who alludes to the ships crew as we. It is only
in the final pages where the narrative voice uses the pronoun I for the first time. The
most obvious rendering of the they narrator is when the tools for the ships
maintenance are lost during the search for James Wait:
huddled close to one another, they fancied themselves utterly alone. They heard
sustained loud noises, and again bore the pain of existence through long hours of
profound silence3
1 Allan H. Simmons, Joseph Conrad, (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2006) p. 57

2 Gary Dexter, How The Nigger of the Narcissus got its name The
Telegraph, 21st September 2008. Avaliable at:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3561050/How-The-Niggerof-the-Narcissus-got-its-name.html (accessed 10th May, 2013)

3 Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the Narcissus (London: Peerage

Books, 1991) p.275. All further references are to this edition and
are given parenthetically in the text.

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This desolation separates the crew, driving them apart. We can compare this to the
unity of the crew during Singletons thirty-hour stint at the wheel alone for the good of
the crew:
We all spoke at once in a thin babbly we had the aspect of invalids and the gestures of
maniacs (p.278)
Conrad uses the alternating pronouns to describe the sense of profound togetherness
during the ships collective efforts for the good of the crew, in comparison to the
desolation and greed shown by characters when times become tough on the Narcissus.
In Conrads Heart Of Darkness our peripheral narrator tells the story of Marlow, who
is telling the tale of another character, Kurtz. Marlow often struggles to comprehend
and describe he sees. Marlow is portrayed as different and alienated and thus adhering
to a prominent trope of modernist literature. We see this exemplified in the narrators
suggestion that Marlow uses a different method in order to tell his story:
To him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside,
enveloping the tale, which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the
likeliness of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral
illumination of moonshine.4
The peripheral narrator therefore serves as a vessel for Conrad to draw back from
Marlows tale in Africa, back into England. Consequently the reader is forced to make
comparisons between the chaotic and unsettling African Landscape with the placid

4 Joseph Conrad, Heart Of Darkness (London: Penguin, 1994) P.8 all

further references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in
the text.

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and peaceful colonial home of England. Critic Ian Watt describes the narrator as The
shell, the larger sphere that encloses a smaller sphere.5 The narrator can draw back
into the ships surroundings, which provides an immediate contrast and comparison of
events. However as the novella develops, we see more and more striking similarities
between the two. It is salient that he uses words such as haze, enveloping and
misty halo. These are all words that have obscuring connotations. These can be
drawn as analogous to the obscured moral vision of the colonial conquest of Africa.
Marlow finds it extremely difficult to transcribe or accurately describe:
The base, primitive, perverse allure of lust and greed in the deepest recesses of the
human psyche [and] the evil at the heart of civilization and modernity6
At the heart of Imperial Africa. He goes on to say regarding perception of his
experience that:
No, it is impossible, it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any epoch of
ones existence that which makes truth, its meaning its subtle and penetrating
essence. It is impossible. We live as we dream alone (P.19)
Marlow fears the audiences perception of his story because nobody can be entirely
concise in their descriptions of events. This is because all of our perceptions of events
5 Ian Watt, Symbolism, In Conrad in the 19th Century, Ian Watt. Ed,
Ian Watt. (California: University of California Press, 1979). P.180

6 Maier-Katkin and Daniel Maier-Katkin , At the Heart of Darkness:

Crimes against Humanity and the Banality of Evil Birgit, Human
Rights Quarterly
Vol. 26, No. 3 (Aug., 2004) (pp. 584-604),Page Count: 21 [available
at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublication?
journalCode=humarighquar] Accessed 11th April, 2013

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differ we live as we dream, alone. We see the novel through Marlows eyes and he
we often question what he says, considering he himself states it is impossible, it is
impossible to convey the life-sensation of any epoch of ones existence. (P.19)
Patricia Waugh describes the effects of Marlows experience in the Congo that have
torn apart the foundations of his sense of identity.7 This is a typical modernist trait,
in that the protagonist questions his identity. This transpires during the temporal space
from leaving a civilized and ordered England, and descending into chaos and
obscurity in the African Congo.
In Joseph Conrads Preface to The Nigger of The Narcissus he wrote that his
work like all fiction if it was to be treated as art must be an impression conveyed
through the senses 8 he suggested that in order to do this It must strenuously aspire
to the plasticity of sculpture, to the colour of painting and to the magic suggestiveness
of music and that the task which I am trying to achieve is by the power of the
written word to make you hear, to make you feel-it is before all to make you see.
(P.2) Analysing this excerpt from the Nigger of the Narcissus can clearly see how he
does this in his narrative form:
The dark land lay alone in the midst of waters, like a mighty ship bestarred with
vigilant lightsa ship carrying the burden of millions of livesa ship freighted with
dross and with jewels, with gold and with steel. She towered up immense and strong,
7 Patricia Waugh, Modernism and Enlightenment: Reading Joseph
Conrads Heart of Darkenss, chapter six of Waugh, Practising
Postmodernism/ Reading Modernism (London: Edward Arnold, 1992),
pp. 89-98, p. 91).

8 Joseph Conrad, Nigger of The Narcissus (London: Peerage Books,

1991) P2. All Further references are to this edition and are given
parenthetically in the text.

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guarding priceless traditions and untold suffering, sheltering glorious memories and
base forgetfulness, ignoble virtues and splendid transgressions. (P.191)
Here we can see how Conrad uses patterns through this description, almost in the
same way that an impressionist painter would paint. He balances priceless traditions
with Untold Suffering and glorious memories and base forgetfulness using a
descriptive, lyrical and poetic style that is harmoniously balanced invocation of the
sea and land, along with ships and men. He goes beyond the realist conventions of
description with a very visibly romanticized, and aesthetic portrait of The Narcissus
returning the England. He is writing to engage all of the senses that he describes in the
preface. This is ubiquitous in Heart of Darkness too:
She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something
ominous and stately in her deliberate progress. And in the hush that had fallen
suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body
of the fecund and mysterious life (P.76)
We can again see the oxymoronic patterning of savage and superb along with
wild eyed and magnificent the words are balanced harmoniously and their
description is to appeal to all of the senses. Kurtz African mistress is doubled at the
end of the novel by Kurtz intended, a precarious balancing of white and black. This
same oxymoronic descriptive strategy is found in The Nigger of The Narcissus:
Life seemed an indestructible thing . . . . It was bright like the twisted flare of
lightning, and more full of surprises than the dark night," and "the sky [was] like a
triumphal arch of eternal light, thrown over the dark pathway of the earth" (P.98-9)

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The emphasis of his prose is on the language of sensation, of flare and lightning,
dark-night and eternal light thrown over the dark pathway. These all are
examples of striking visual imagery and nature. Conrad here is alluding to life as an
experience of binary opposites that defies realist description. An example of this
multi-sensory-description in the Nigger of the Narcissus:
Mr. Baker, Chief mate of the ship Narcissus, stepped in one stride out of his lighted
cabin into the darkness of the quarter deck. Above his head, on the break of the poop,
the night watchman rang a double stroke. It was nine oclock (P.1)
This description is a sequence of sensations, mainly visual darkness/lighted, aural
the night watchman rang a double stroke and also with a sense of movement in one
stride. This order and balance is where Conrad differs from the high modernist
styles of James Joyce or Virginia Woolf who often used disorder as one of their main
modernist themes. Here Conrad shows the binary opposites working in harmony.
This hints at indebtedness to an older literary model of realism that values order; with
the old and new forms jostling in Conrads prose. Conrad describes the Narcissus as
being manned by a crew of shades (P.143) which again alludes to light/dark
imagery that permeates the novel. This mode of sensory description allows for a
much more appealing sense of the rendering of the scene as it does not merely use
sight, but sound and noise to give us a fulfilling portrait of the scene aboard the
Narcissus.
Heart Of Darkness narrator, Marlow shows us very quickly of his feelings of
alienation from the his audience on the boat:

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Do you see the Story? Do you See Anything? It seems to be I am trying to tell you a
dream- making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dreamsensation
This alienation is one of the over arching themes of the text, of not feeling part of
something and the narrators questioning imperial actions in the Congo, and more so
the writers own complicated morals in his perceptions of right and wrong. This is
comparable to the Nigger of the Narcissus which emphasises the Bonding of the
Crew, which purges itself of disruptive individualism9 clearly making it more
important to be part of solid group working towards the same goal than the disruptive
and laconic figure of James Wait.
Word Count 1640
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Joseph Conrad, Heart Of Darkness (London: Penguin, 1994)
Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the Narcissus (London: Peerage Books, 1991)

Secondary Sources
Dexter, Gary How The Nigger of the Narcissus got its name The Telegraph, 21st
September 2008. Avaliable at:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3561050/How-The-Nigger-of-theNarcissus-got-its-name.html (accessed 10th May, 2013)
9 Bruce Henricksen, The Construction of the Narrator in The Nigger
of the Narcissus, PMLA n.s 5 (1988) 783-795 (P.784)

Henricksen, Allan H. The Construction of the Narrator in The Nigger of the

Narcissus, PMLA n.s 5 (1988) 783-795
Simmons, Allan H, Joseph Conrad, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)
Waugh, Patricia, Modernism and Enlightenment: Reading Joseph Conrads Heart of
Darkenss, chapter six of Waugh, Practising Postmodernism/ Reading Modernism
(London: Edward Arnold, 1992)