by Peter Sinclair

Created on: March 31, 2009

Perhaps Marlow Did Not Lie to the Intended: Telling and Re-telling Stories.

Joseph Conrad explores not only the dynamics of narrating in Heart of Darkness; the meaning of the novella depends upon how Marlow re-tells a story. We all know that the narrative ends when Marlow lies to Kurtz's "Intented" in order to shield her from the truth. "'The last word he pronounced was-your name.'" Marlow's forged transmission of Kurtz's final words leave the Intended feeling "inconceivable triumph" as opposed to the shock of, "The horror! The horror!" Marlow feels compelled to tell his story again since he had failed to bring it to a true ending when he delivers the Intended Kurtz's message.

Marlow tells us much earlier in the narrative:"You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie . . . simply because it appalls me." His lie to the Intended evidently makes him appalled at himself. Much has been made in literary criticism concerning Marlow's misogynistic belief that women, to echo Jack Nicholas, "can't handle the truth." The comforts of Western civilization that comprise her residence compels Marlow to keep the Intended protected from the darkness: "a lofty drawing room with three long windows . . . gilt legs and backs of furniture . . . tall marble fireplace" and a "grand piano stood massively in a corner," the keys, no doubt, manufactured from the ivory Kurtz once exported from his private hell. In contrast to the heart of the Congo, "a shadow darker than the shadow of the night," Kurtz's true words would echo with the Intended in her setting like a disturbing foreign language as opposed to the "affirmation" and "moral victory" Marlow believes they reflect. The Intended's living space transforms for Marlow into an image of the lie of Western civilization, where "flat surfaces" surround him "like a sombre and polished sarcophagus."

The question remains, however, does Marlow tell the truth this time around when he narrates his story to his fellow seamen on the Nellie? Does re-telling a story, narrating a revised version, make a story more true? Or does the very act of revising a narrative immediately call its veracity into question? In other words, is Marlow an "unreliable narrator"?

As much as Marlow quests for truth in his winding journey through Africa, he wants to convey the truth. But he veils the language of his narrative with obfuscating adjectives. He constructs many of his sentences out of strings of descriptive language that become both excessive and, at times, meaningless.

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