The use and effects of the kinds of narrators within Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Joseph Corad’s Heart of Darkness and William Golding’s Lord of the flies.
...uction to Wuthering Heights, David Daiches remarks on the contrast between the tone of the narrative and the high drama of the goings-on of the story: "It is to what might be called the sublime deadpan of the telling that the extraordinary force of the novel can largely be attributed.... At no point does Nelly throw up her hands and exclaim: 'For God's sake, what is going on here? What kind of people are they?' However, other critics criticise her impartiality, and therefore, her inadequacy as a narrator as she consciously hides Catherine the fact that Heatcliff has been listening whilst she confessed her inclination towards Edgar and what is more, she doesn’t warn Edgar of the serious state of her wife, as well as hiding Edgar the meetings of young Linton Heatcliff and his daughter Cathy, what makes her degree of perceptibility to be at times on doubt, and her overtness to be patent. With the use of various narrators, the reader receives small amounts of information and has to work out for himself the pieces of the story as in a puzzle. This technique is used by Brontë to dossify the information given in order to exacerbate the curiosity of the reader and preserving the sensation of ambiguity and uncertainty within the novel. The framing narrative of Heart of Darkness is presented by an unnamed, undefined speaker, who is one of a group of sailors sitting on a the deck of a yacht at the mouth of the Thames River. Most of the novel is narrated by Marlow, although Conrad sometimes brings us back to the yacht and ends the novel there, London England. Marlow narrates his story about his experience in Africa in first person, describing only what he witnessed, and proving his own commentary on the story. He is an intradiegetic- homodiegetic narrator as, although it was long ago, he existed in the level of the story narrated as a character taking part in it. As a device to present the events, Marlow is useful due to its realism as he is able to give us the perspective of the protagonist, which inhaces the sense of authenticity and immediacy. Also, as in Wuthering Heights, the technique of a framing narrative brings up questions of memory: how reliable is a story when related by someone many years after the fact, then reported by someone else? Although the reader identifies with Marlow in the sense that he is a character of good nature, and he is the lens through which we are able to acknowledge of all the atrocities in the colonising project, he is extremely overt, and his reliability shines due to it’s absence. Marlow confesses to think the project was “reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity and cruel without courage” , yet he is involved and part of the whole project. This leads us to think how Marlow is accomplice of the atrocities taking place, and his hypocrisy is emphasized in his great lie to Kurt’s intended. Marlow cannot bring himself to shatter her illusions with the truth. Instead, he tells her that Kurtz’s last word was her name. In lying to her and telling about Kurtz that “his goodness shone in every act” , Marlow’s credibility as a narrator is questioned, and to reader’s eyes he becomes a cynical witness and symbolical accomplice in maintaining the façade of colonialism. In contrast with both books one could mention Lord of the flies, which as Heart of Darkness, explores the dark side of human nat...