Marlow’s Debut Role as Narrator in Joseph Conrad’s Youth

Story telling has been a means of communicating a point of view by a novelist to his readers and also of handing down tradition, folklore and culture. A story originates in the mind of an individual as he/she gives shape to his perception of an experience weaving the magic of his/her narration. A narrator brings to life images that excite the imagination of his/her listeners, enabling them to create a world which is inhabited by the characters of his/her stories which are not only meaningful, but serve to emulate human experience itself.

In every narrative there is a hidden narrator. A narrator is either a first person narrator or a third person narrator… “First person narrative means writing from the “I” point of view…Third person narrative form is writing from the omniscient point of view…Second person is the least-used form in novels, mainly because it usually reads more awkwardly”…(Harper 2004 ,1). Occasionally, one comes across a second person narrator as well, in which he narrates from the ‘you’ point of view. The reader sees the world that the novelist portrays through the narrator and after having read a novel, he returns to reality: ‘we might substitute for our own life an obsessive reading of novels, or dreams based on novelistic models’ (Bakhtin, 32). The novelist creates a situation which appears to be real and he also creates characters that are "free people, capable of standing alongside,"(Bakhtin 6)

A novelist may allow the narrator to have more knowledge than that of an ordinary person and he may even limit the knowledge that he allows the narrator to have. He may use a single source of information which is personified as the narrator or he may use a source of information which is less specific. Joseph Conrad’s ...

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4. Beach, Joseph Warren. The Twentieth Century Novel: Studies In Technique, New Delhi: Kalyani Publishers, 1988.

5 .Berthoud, Jacques (1978. Cambridge University Press) Joseph Conrad

6. Booth, Wayne C. “Telling and Showing”. (From: Twentieth Century Criticism. The Major Statements). Ed. William J. Handy &Max Westbrook. Indian Edition: (1976). Light & Life Publishers, New Delhi.

7. Conrad, Joseph. Author’s note to The Rescue. London: Penguin Modern Classics 1978

8 . Harper, Tara K. “First Person or Third”. 2004. Writer’s Workshop. Web. 20 February. 2012.

9. Peters, John G. (ed): A Historical Guide to Joseph Conrad. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.Print.

WEB SOURCES:

1.Woolf, Virginia. Joseph “Conrad” from The Common Reader. http//ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/Virginia/w91c/chapter20.html.n.d.Web. 18 July 2011.