Personal Quest in The Heart of Darkness

we are also accompanying the story's narrator, Marlow, on a

personal quest of his own. As Wayne C. Booth (152) has pointed out, narrators may be central to the action of a story or merely a device used by an author to gain some distance from that action. In Conrad's The Heart of Darkness the story has as much to do with Marlow's reappraisal of his own values as it does with Kurtz himself.

Booth says that when a narrator is presented as

central to the action of the story, the reader tends to accept

what the narrator tells as inherently valid (152). According to Booth, it is very reasonable to question Marlow and his motives from the very beginning of the journey away from the stability and security of England (152). From the very first pages of the story, we learn that this is to be another of Marlow's "inconclusive" stories (Conrad 30). Marlow, we are told, did not look into a story for meaning; rather, he looked to its exterior, fi

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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1188
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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