Blanchot's view on the status of the narrative voice is very relevant to any discussion of Heart of Darkness. “Something indeterminate” and “spectral” implies a lack of stability and centrality which is strongly rendered in the novel by the use of multiple narrators within a framed narrative structure. This essay will explore each narrative layer in turn and show how each adds a layer of uncertainty and doubt to the narrative being told. This removes any sense of a fixed center in the work, which belies any attempt to accurately question and interrogate the speaking voice. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay The real "I" in the text is the man sitting on the Nellie who is listening to Marlow's voice. However, this “I” is an unknown quantity. Barthes defines the creation of characters as “when identical semes pass through the same proper noun several times and seem to settle there.” However, no such form is given here. It is only the occasional use of “I” that makes it easy to distinguish this first-person narrator from a third-person narrative. We have to wait until the fourth paragraph to establish this figure “I”, before that, the more inclusive and therefore fragmented pronouns “we” and “our” are used. The vagueness of this voice has led many to identify this unknown narrator, who barely figures in the short story, as analogous to Joseph Conrad himself. The novella certainly follows closely on Conrad's personal experience of sailing up the Congo River himself in 1890. This device may have been used to create some distance between him and the controversial narrative he was telling. The story is told to the character I, the Lawyer and the Accountant, who allegedly benefited from colonization while living in ignorance of its excesses. The controversial aspect of the novel begins with Marlow's first speech: "And this has been one of the darkest places on earth." "Dark" in the context of the novel is analogous to uncivilized and this is emphasized in later descriptions of the darkness of the Thames to Roman colonizers, reversing the traditional social Darwinian logic that Europeans are "fitter" than those whom they enslave. This implies a cyclical aspect of colonization, implying that as the Roman Empire colonized and then fell, European empires fell, replaced by the very peoples who were once oppressed. However, this autobiographical reading does not generate clarity and stability in the narrative voice. Instead, it simply adds another layer of complication to the voice, where the figure of "I" is a battle between multiple people vying for supremacy in the work. This battle can never be resolved, which means that the narrative “I” is inherently in flux, with no fixed center to refer to. The instability of the narrative voice is reinforced by the fact that the story we hear is told by another character, Marlow. Blanchot states that “the narrator is not a historian”. Its song is the domain where the event which takes place there comes to speech, in the presence of memory. This implies the narrator's power to manipulate the story: "in presence", emphasizing that the narrator has no obligation to follow the events as they occurred in his memory. And even these memories will be biased, as the phrase “it’s strange how out of touch women are with the truth” shows. Peter Brooks observes that "if Marlow is only one voice, then the authority of his narrative depends entirely on hisverbal act, of his rhetoric” and it is clear that in this case, his view of women creates a bias in his narration, moving the narrative further. far from the truth of the situation. This power of interpretation can also be extended to the anonymous "I" in the text who would have the same power to omit and interpret Marlow's story that Marlow had over his own story. The fact that Marlow literally disappears in the context of the story is emblematic of this narrative power: “I listened on the alert for the phrase, the word which would give me the clue to the slight unease inspired by this story which seemed to be formed without human lips in the heavy night air.” This sentence has an intoxicating character. The forty-word long sentence draws the reader into the text and keeps them in suspense, while the language creates a feeling of dread. “Discomfort,” “seemed,” “without,” and “dark” all imply uncertainty, and the phrase “without human lips” implies that there is in fact no narrator. He points out that the narrative voice has no inherent truth beyond its recitation, meaning that it is impossible to arrive at a "true" telling of the story. This means that the narrative voice is inherently “indeterminate,” in that it does not refer to any single truth. This unreliability is further highlighted by its inability to follow a traditional narrative structure in which we move from a state of mystery to a state of clarity. Barthes states that “To tell a story is to ask the question as if it were a subject that one is slow to predict; and when the predicate (the truth) arrives, the story is over. However, this “hermeneutic code” does not work for Heart of Darkness, because Marlow fails to offer the reader any resolution to his story. The inherent mystery created by the first line of dialogue, which serves to catalyze the narrative, is never resolved. A series of what Bathes calls "delays in the flow of discourse" were caused by the repeated failure to meet Kurtz at stations farther and farther inland. This delay implies that there is a hermeneutic structure that will lead to a final dispensation of meaning. Even the title suggests it, with the word "Heart" implying that there will be a journey to a discovery at a central point. However, there is no central meaning, and our desire for meaning is ridiculed by Marlow's lie to "intent" about Kurtz's last words. To this lie, she responds: “I knew it, I was sure of it!” She knew it. She was sure of it. » The repetition of his words indicating the narrator's certainty about what we know to be a lie creates irony in the passage. It demands meaning from history and therefore constructs it through a lie. The fact that the tale does not have an obvious meaning is announced at the beginning of the novel: "the meaning of an episode was not inside like a core but outside, enveloping the story which did not make it emerge that like a glow brings out a mist, like one of those misty halos which are sometimes made visible by the spectral lighting of moonlight. The expressions "misty", "glow", and "mist" all imply that the light is indistinct and not entirely visible, which is evidenced by the fact that these indistinct mists are only "sometimes" made visible. The absence of a core also implies that it will always be illusory and impossible to obtain in its entirety. Marlow's failure to follow traditional narrative rules leads his voice to become "spectral," as we attempt to decipher the meaning of a text that refuses to offer the reader easy solutions to the multitude of questions it raised. 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