TY - JOUR ID - TI - Narrator’s Reliability in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness موثوقية الراوي في قلب الظلام لجوزيف كونراد AU - HAMEED MANA DAIKH PY - 2021 VL - IS - الجزء الثاني /وقائع المؤتمر العلمي الدولي الثاني للعلوم الانسانية والاجتماعية والصرفة SP - 75 EP - 86 JO - journal of the college of basic education مجلة كلية التربية الاساسية SN - 18157467 27068536 AB - Most of time, the major characters in a literary work especially the protagonist is assumed to be, at least, another image of the author. So, the leading character in the novella is another replica of Conrad, who, both in reality and in fiction, plays the main role in the journey to the dark continent and enriches novella with his rational observations. The journey of 1890 that Conrad participated to Congo has transformed him into distorted, full of wounds, emotionally defeated and sickness. Marlowe was very enthusiastic and attempted to polish the ugly picture of imperialism. Therefore, before the journey, he had clashing views that turned the readers to be skeptic about Marlow’s story especially in the first part of novella. He has come through violence, and danger of nature, the inability to sense reality and the ethical obscurity. Marlow’s unreliability came from his views which are told several times for different characters. He supports the imperialistic and racial views when he called conges as primitives. Even some characters in his journey are unnamed during the journey. This will make readers observe that some incidents, tendencies, feelings, and reactions are not authentic and unreliable because of the narrator’s unreliability. Throughout novella, Marlow’s attitudes, stands, and views fluctuate and do not meet the readers’ expectations. This kind of fluctuation creates the sense of uneasiness, which pervades the whole novella and make readers judge that Marlow is unreliable narrator, who attempts to polish certain ugly images in novella like Kurtz, Europe, company, and imperialism. Marlow was inconsistent in his narrative and there is no doubt that this inconsistency turns him to be unreliable especially when readers find this discrepancy because it destabilizes readers.

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