Joseph Conrad's novel, The 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 (Thomas 238 --239). The reader is led to believe at the outset of the novel that the object of the journey is to find a man called Kurtz; as the journey into the center of the "dark continent" progresses, the reader becomes aware that
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, finding that "...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" (Conrad 30).
This is like the colonial experience, which looked to itself and its own "home society" to determine what was and was not acceptable (or even valid) in its new territories.
Like teenagers, Marlow and Kurtz are men who are disobeying the rules of the societies. Like teenagers, th...