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영어

This paper examines the main feature of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, especially "double plot" through his new style. Conrad offers himself from the first as a dogged innovator of fictional techniques, like his own Kurtz one of the first through explores of a rather dark continent; and it is tempting to read him for the sophisticated pleasure one takes in recognizing novel and schematizable, if not necessarily expressive, method. Conrad's innovation-or, in any case, the fictional technique that he exploited with unprecedented thoroughness-is the double plot: neither allegory (where surface is something teasing, to be got though), nor catch- all symbolism (where every knowing particular signifies some universal or other), but a developing order of actions spirit-from moment to moment, so morally identifiable-as to suggest the conditions of allegory without forfeiting or even something the realistic "superficial" claim of the actions and their actors. In Heart of Darkness, Conrad is neither cynical nor laxly sentimental in his failure of imagination and corresponding failure of technique. The theme is much for him, too much for perhaps any but the very greatest dramatists and novelists. But his "new style" has been regarded as the first attempt leading a new area in English novel.