• 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.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.23
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• pp.7-32
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• 2011

In this article, we tried to introduce a little-known work of M.A. Bulgakov "Snowstorm" and provide some various clues for reading this short story. This study is focused on "snowstorm-plot", grasping the structure and the theme of the present work. To this end, in the Chapter II we tired to seek for the meanings of Bulgakov's "snowstorm" based on intertextuality shown from the works by those writers such as Pushkin, Gogol and Tolstoy. In this short story "snowstorm" is presented not only as a natural phenomenon but as a "participant" which provides young doctor-narrator with short time break and let him go to a dying bride, and at last place him on the crossroads of life and death. Indeed "snowstorm" plays a role of the framed structure of Bulgakov's text. In the Chapter III we observed the creative expression of Bulgakov's work which is comprised of overlappings with dream and reality. In other words, in the short story "Snowstorm" the outside and the inside story of frame are described as a dream of the one same night. We can guess that the Shermetievo story is a kind of dream of young doctor who fell asleep in Tuesday night, asking himself "how many patients will come tomorrow?". By the way the Shermetievo story unfolds as an incident which is happened on Wednesday. In this way in Bulgakov's "Snowstorm" it is hard to draw clear lines of demarcation between dream and reality. Therefore existential themes like these "Life and Death", "Professional calling and personal conscience", "The great nature and the week human being" are resonated with original structure "Dream in Dream".