Defamiliarization: Conrad's Artistic Creation In Heart Of Darkness

Conrad is acknowledged as one of the greatest novelists in English language and one of the originators of modernist literature. He is the most unconventional and innovative literature experimenter and English stylist of his time. The modernist style of his works mainly results from his extremely unique writing strategies which make his novels full of open-endedness, uncertainty, ambiguity and disparity.This essay aims at exploring the novel's artistic effects at both narrative and linguistic aspects from the theory of defamiliarization. It attempts to identify and evaluate the techniques of defamiliarization by examining the productive interaction between the ingenious techniques and the relevant themes, ideologies and aesthetical values. At the narrative level, the author mainly employs the frame narrative structure, the collage narrative structure and the impressionism narrative techniques while at the linguistic levels, he makes good use of linguistic devices, such as underlexicalization, lexical choice for narrative shift, good use of past progressive aspects, present participles, elliptical sentences and rhetorical devices ----- symbolism, parallelism and metaphor. It is an exceptionally proleptic text because it has the following factors: its satiric verve and skeptical boldness, its suggestive density and ambiguity—the layered narration, ironic meanings, symbolic suggestions and multiplicity, its radical paradoxicality, etc. As far as the layered narration is concerned, the introduction of Marlow as an inner frame narrator is not merely technical, but intimately connected with Conrad's uncertainty and experimentation as a writer of fiction. As for the inner frame narration, Marlow's story is inlayed into an anonymous first-person narrator's story, an outer frame narration. This essay argues that the creator skillfully deforms his ways of dealing with the narrative strategies, handling the language and controlling the rhetorical devices to aggravate the aesthetical difficulties and heighten the aesthetic values, that it is the employment of the creating technique of defamiliarization that mostly results in its great success, and that Heart of Darkness represents the main achievements of Conrad in his literary experiment with the technique of defamiliarization. The defamiliarization technique is one of Conrad's major means to practise his narrative and linguistic experimentations in his monumental work and his attempt is both successful and suggestive.