A Stylistic Analysis On Heart Of Darkness

Heart of Darkness, one of the masterpieces of Joseph Conrad, is a key document of thecolonial era, and at the same time, its clarity, vitality and stylistic brilliance arouse enormousinterest and admiration in readers and attract a great many critics to the exploration of itsincomparable charm. This essay will make a relatively overall and objective analysis of thenovel’s language by adopting the method used by Leech and Short in their stylistics book:Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose. The author will conducta stylistic analysis to this novel from the four categories including vocabulary, grammar,figure of speech, cohesion and context. By such a detailed stylistic analysis, the author aims toexplain how the thematic meaning of the novel is created through the writer’s linguisticchoices. The detailed research contents are as follows. First, what stylistic features does thelanguage in describing characters have in these four aspects? Second, what stylistic featuresdoes the language in describing things have in these four aspects? Third, how does the novelpresent the thematic meaning by its special language? According to these research questions,this thesis, based on the analysis and illustration of Heart of Darkness from the stylisticperspective, draws the following conclusions. As for the language in describing characters, interms of lexical categories, the frequencies of nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are aboutthe same; in terms of syntactic categories, preposition phrases are outstanding, the alternativeoccurrence of long and short sentences is obvious, and especially short sentences are forstressing the point; in terms of figures of speech, compared to similes and metaphors,repetitions and parallel structures are slightly more frequent; in terms of cohesion and context,extensive use of personal pronouns, lexical and syntactical repetition are significant features.As for the language in describing things, in terms of lexical categories, nouns and adjectivesare prominent; in terms of syntactic categories, the number of long sentences is far over thatof short sentences, preposition phrases are highlighted, and sentence complexity almost comesfrom the use of prepositions; in terms of figures of speech, similes, metaphors, and similarstructures are greatly considered; in terms of cohesion and context, the uses of semicolons, the definite article and coordinating conjunctions are the most obvious. And all in all, the themeof the novel is mainly presented by the vocabularies, which are closely connected withdarkness and death, and by different kinds of figures of speech. Applying such a stylisticsmodel to the interpretation and appreciation of a literary work will enable us to have a moreprofound and insightful understanding of the language and the theme of the work. Therefore,it is of great use and necessity to introduce stylistics into literary interpretation andappreciation. Moreover, it can not only deepen our comprehensive understanding andprofound using of general linguistic theories, and also provide us a new way of appreciatingnovels.