"A lot of men too indolent for whist—and a story" The Telling Situation in "Youth," Heart of Darkness, and Lord Jim

Abstract

This essay closely reads the “telling situations” of the Marlow trilogy. These meta-narratives represent a specific type of the storytelling “occasion” (James Phelan’s “narrative as rhetoric”) that is self-conscious. I argue Conrad was ultimately more interested in how we impose the form of a narrative onto a narration of another person’s life-events in an attempt to account for the other’s thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and desires than in the life-events themselves, hence my focus on meta-narrative and narration. In these meta-narratives, Marlow points to the ways in which his anticipation of his audience’s expectations for his stories (namely that a tale will set them to rest) have shaped their narrative structure. The shift in Marlow’s role as narrator from “Youth” to the subsequent tales is revolutionary: in “Youth,” Marlow’s tale is flawlessly transmitted and received, setting everyone involved at rest; in Heart of Darkness, Marlow refuses to satisfy his audience’s expectations, narrativizing Kurtz, through an unreliable interpretation of his last words, as a tragic hero in order, instead, to set himself at rest; and in Lord Jim, Marlow has transformed into someone who is wary of his own and others’ need to redeem Jim in the form of narrative. Marlow’s function as character-narrator is to make readers constantly aware that when someone—whether implied author, narrator, character, or implied reader—writes the stories of others’ lives, she does so as the result of some underlying motivation and under the pressures of her own and audiences’ expectations and narrative form.