Conrad's Narrative Studies

Joseph Conrad (1857~1924), one of the greatest writers in Britain in the late19th century. F. R. Leavis recognizes him as “The Great Tradition”, as well as JaneAustine, Henry James and George Eliot,which has a great influence on the history ofEnglish Literature.Conrad’s works can be divided into three main parts: ocean novels, jungle fictionand political fiction. His ocean novels were on the basis of his career of seamanwhich are the most successful works in his life. In these novels Conrad used someexperimental skills on the narration. This paper is aimed to research thecharacteristic of Conradian narration from narrative time, narrator and the narrativelanguage.The first part of the paper mainly talks about the sequence of time,time-distance and frequency. Different from the traditional novels, Conrad didn’t tellthe story according to the story time. He used narration interspersed with flashbacks,flashback and prolepse in his story, which caused anachtony. He takes these methodsto make the story not only approaching the real life, but also crossing the spacesmuch more easily by the changing of the time. It is also make the readers drawn intothe story deeply.Conrad has his own skills on the narrative point of view. Firstly, he used theframe structure, which is also used by other writers. But the main purpose of othersis just to draw forth the story, however, Conrad make the narration changed betweenintradiegetic narrator and extradiegetic narrator. Conrad also introduced Marlow totell his story, Marlow addition to narrative function,as well as management,communication, thinking and so on. Conrad also uses polyphonic practices, so thatthe characters in the book can express their views on the events freely. Conrad hidesthe thoughts of the author in order to approach the reduction of the real world.Conrad’s narrative language is full of symbolic and rhythm. Conrad’s novels filledwith a variety of different symbols: the name of a symbol, the images of a symboland color symbolizes. Conrad novels’ rhythm emerged from the novels of alliteration, and sentence parallelism. The characteristics of Conrad’s narrative language areaffected by a variety of cultural influences, and are closely related with the literaryideas of Henry James and Impressionist.So this paper is based on the Conrad’s novels and combined with the theory ofnarratology in order to do a more comprehensive analysis of the characteristics ofthe Conrad’s narrative time, the narrative point of view and narrative language.