• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.45
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• pp.479-496
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• 2016

The aim of this essay was to investigate Marlow's desire for constructing enlightenment subject of knowledge and power sustained by the collusion of imperialism and patriarchy in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Marlow's narrative, based on his journey up the river in Africa to retrieve Kurtz, attempts to conceptualize himself as the subject of the enlightenment reason and rationality. In the novella, collusive network of ideologies of empire and gender contributes to the making of a Western Enlightenment subject. Marlow eulogizes himself for realizing the harsh realities of imperialism, political domination and economic exploitation of the natives in Africa. However, Marlow is a colonial subject who has been ruled by the hierarchical system of thought in the Western logocentrism. He is not aware that his narrative has already been infiltrated by the ideological discourse of the totalitarian enlightenment. His narrative in effect is not a self-congratulatory testimony to truth and realities but a narcissistic and self-defeating document. Marlow unconsciously employs the totalitarian ideologies of empire and gender in order to relegate the African natives to the inhuman existence and to consign women to the sphere of illusion.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.4
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• pp.625-649
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• 2011

Even though "An Outpost of Progress" and Heart of Darkness were based upon Joseph Conrad the sailor's same experience in Congo Free State, their narrative strategies are quite different. The realistic representation of "An Outpost of Progress," with which Conrad was not satisfied at all, was converted into the modernistic narrative strategy of Heart of Darkness so that the sympathetic power of the story should be improved. The conservative value system of realism is expressed by the omniscient author in "An Outpost of Progress," whereas the frame narrator of Heart of Darkness is proved to be an unreliable one whose norms and behavior are not in accordance with the implied author. The glorious history of the British Empire, which was proudly presented by the frame narrator at the beginning of Heart of Darkness, was strongly opposed by Marlow, another narrator, who said that the British Empire had been "one of the dark places of the earth" when ruled by the Roman Empire. The feeling of the frame narrator was uneasily changed into the gloomy mood when he described the Thames as the flow which "seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness" at the end of Heart of Darkness. Similar to the straightforward narrative strategy of representation in "An Outpost of Progress," the realistic approach of Part I in Heart of Darkness is considered by Conrad as insufficient to reveal the darkest truth of imperialism, which was declared by Kurtz as "The Horror! The Horror!" Thus Conrad uses the Chinese-box structure, in which Kurtz' episode is enveloped by Marlow's tale which is enclosed by the frame narrator's story, in order to penetrate into the mind of ordinary readers in the novelist's age of New Colonialism, while attacking the ideology itself of imperialism instead of critisizing its inefficiency and individualism.