Narrative Solidarity and Competition for Truth and Signification

Conrad is famous for his technical experimentation and sophisticated narrative methods. Several of his works are articulated around a dual-voice narrative, based on an authorial or frame narrator and a personal narrator, whose voice blends with secondary sources of enunciation. This kind of structural organization breaks down narrative linearity, episte-mological unity, and linear reading. It creates a productive dialogical context where meaning and truth are set in dialectical relationships. In consequence, the overall narrative structure ramifies and radiates in several directions, allowing meaning and truth to proliferate. Lord Jim and ‘Heart of Darkness’, among others, are founded on a multiple focalization and their narrative planes are organized along a hierarchical paradigm. In both works, the frame narrator sets the scene of the tale and then recedes. He dwells on the margins of the text, occasionally emerging to issue a comment or generalization; intrusions that might be interpreted as the echoes of a persistent authorial presence haunting the narrative’s interstices. As shown in the first chapter, Conrad is a haunting presence in his fiction. His diffused, elusive voice is heard through narrators and characters as diverse as Marlow ( LJ, HD, C ), Decoud ( N ), Stein ( LJ ), or Heyst ( V ). The interplay of these various voices and perspectives creates a network of echoes and shadows where truth and meaning blur. Generally when the frame narrator fades, the yarn is taken up by a named narrator who tells his tale to a usually silent, attentive audience. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.