Shifting Point of View in Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad's novel, Heart of Darkness, offers readers a unique opportunity to journey in search of a man's soul while also recognizing that Conrad is telling a story of man's participation in the "age of discovery" which included the expansion of European colonial power into areas such as Africa. The environment of the "dark continent" exerts its influence on both Marlow and Kurtz, shaping their disparate understandings of their environment and their own mission. 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. The point-of-view is initially focused on Kurtz but it becomes Marlow's story as he recognizes his culpability in colonialism. As Kinkead-Weekes (32) notes, "Kurtz: the white man going to pieces in the tropics, the absence of restraint, the 'freedom' taken in terms of pure power, the probe going into a hollowness, the empty shells of what were homes, a human ribcage that should have contained a heart. The primary experience is of Marlow's eyes opening, stage by stage, to the reality of colonial 'Mission.'" In Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness the story has as much to do with Marlow's reappraisal of his own values as it does with Kurtz himself.

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, findin

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