Discuss the relation between narrative style and moral judgement

This recalls a comment made some years later by Virginia Woolf. She wrote ‘Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; but a luminous halo, a semi- transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.’3 

For both Marlow and Woolf, meaning is not something ‘arranged’ or concrete, rather, it is a ‘halo’, made visible by the preconceptions of the subject, and as such, the narrative of Heart of Darkness is directed towards Marlow’s efforts to define this ‘halo’, by directing attention inward, towards the actions performed by the subject that endow the world with meaning.

This style of narrative, then, is consistent with the process Edmund Husserl termed the ‘epochē’, a suspension of normal assumptions about the world in order to focus upon how the subject constitutes their experience, and thus, Conrad’s literary style was acquiescent with the philosophical developments of his time.

 Bruce Johnson notes that ‘The epochē is to be found elsewhere in impressionism and early modernism, and represents a generosity about subjective experience’4. 

In Heart of Darkness, this emphasis on subjective experience is found in the difficulties Marlow has in expressing his perceptions accurately and making fair judgements. He can be an unreliable narrator, on several occasions providing the reader with information which later transpires to be false. 

Watt defines this ‘delayed decoding’5 as the method by which the author gives ‘direct narrative expression to the way in which consciousness elicits meaning from its perceptions’6. This meaning may be inaccurate, for example, when the steamer is attacked: