Heart of darkness: narrative of a silenced otherness

Abstract

Heart of darkness, by Joseph Conrad, is a narrative full of gaps, which may be interpreted by the reader in different ways. These gaps involve both what is silenced by the narrative and the darkness which is impenetrable by the eyes of the narrator. Therefore, literary criticism, based on different views, has applied its characteristic looks towards these gaps, and thus discovered many ways of reading Conrad’s text. This work aims at exposing different ways to interpret the unspoken and unfathomable based on different contemporary theories of literature: Deconstruction, Psychoanalytic Criticism, Reader-Response Criticism and New Historicism. In order to do this, essays by J. Hillis Miller, Frederick R. Karl, Ross C. Murfin, Adena Rosmarin and Brook Thomas, present in the collection Heart of darkness: a case study in contemporary criticism, edited by Ross C. Murfin, are used as theoretical reference. We intend to demonstrate how the different perspectives, taken together, support the relativity of the interpretation, while they affirm the impossibility of a full understanding, by the ‘civilized European’, of the meaning of the narrative he weaves about the culture he intends to master.