Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to analyze Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness in line with Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism. Heart of Darkness is Conrad’s novel written in 1899, in which Marlow narrates the story of the voyage he took part in up the Congo River into the Congo State in Africa. This paper analyses Conrad’s text in relation to Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony to show how Conrad represents the various voices and discourses in the narrative through a dialogic pattern that serves to illustrate the thematic concern of the novel. The paper highlights how the voices and discourses that exist both within Marlow’s discourse as well in the other characters’ discourses work together to formulate Conrad’s stance on imperialism and his critique of its ideological manifestations.
Highlights
1 This paper analyses the narrative discourse in Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness to show Conrad’s position towards imperialism
In The Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin proposes that a speech utterance has elements of polyphony and hetroglossia as it “participates in the ‘unitary language’ and at the same time partakes of social and historical heteroglossia” (272)
As the analysis has shown, the narrative in Heart of Darkness is characterized by its polyphonic quality
Summary
1 This paper analyses the narrative discourse in Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness to show Conrad’s position towards imperialism. There is a commentary on the colonial-postcolonial power relations within this literary narrative. It is necessary to comment on language and linguistic discourse to show how their qualities are important in forming the events in the story. One major concern in postcolonialist studies is to analyze critically the narrative discourse of literary texts representing the colonial experience. This type of study mainly sheds light on colonialist discourses that support colonization and colonial enterprises, especially with the claim of the ‘civilizing mission’ that the colonialist Europeans hold towards the colonized
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