The Narrative Strategy of Heart of Darkness and Its Film Adaptations

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초록

The narrative strategy of Heart of Darkness, which has not been satisfactorily explained, is one of the major causes of continuous critical debates on its literary and cultural significance and also on its recent film adaptations such as Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979/2001), Bob Christiansen and Rick Rosenberg’s Heart of Darkness (1994) and Peter Jackson’s King Kong (2005).
The critical evaluation of Heart of Darkness is, therefore, closely related with the analysis of its narrative strategy. Heart of Darkness is a story of the writing of Marlow as well as a writing of the story of Kurtz. There is a multi-level narrative structure here, with the frame structure of Chinese boxes, in which more narrative levels are likely to be detected than the levels of Kurtz’s episode and Marlow’s tale. Heart of Darkness has a multi-level frame narrative structure. Each narrative has a double time structure: story time and discourse time. Heart of Darkness has a least quadruple time structure: Kurtz’s episode, Marlow’s tale, the frame narrative and the implied writer’s writing. The space of each narrative is quite different. Kurtz’s episode happens in the River Congo area. Marlow’s yarn is spinning on the Nellie on the Thames. The frame narrative is narrated somewhere in London. The ideal space for literary creation is assumed for the implied writer. Each space is independent in its own purpose for each narrative but metaphorically enclosed by its neighboring higher narrative. Each narrative is independent in its own progress but dependent on its neighboring narrative for its significance. The enclosure of higher narrative level is not flawless. Its incompleteness is rather accentuated in many ways. The topological hierarchy of layers of narrations in this Chinese box structure is often disturbed so that the relationship between two neighboring narratives may be described as subversive ironic relationship as in the case of Marlow’s tale and the frame narrative.
The narrative structure of film is not so similar to that of the novel. The difference between the two modes of narrative is principally caused by the fact that film narrative is presented mainly by way of showing while literary narrative is represented by way of telling. The narrator, i.e., a telling person, is, therefore, a prime presenter of the main story in novel for its dominant medium is language. Director plays a major role in film. This is why narrator is not easy to express in the film in which telling is not so dominant a mode of communication as in the novel. But it is rather spontaneous and natural to assume the director in a position quite similar to the implied author which is really difficult to discern in novel as another agent of directing its narrative flow.
The narrative strategy of film is different from that of novel. This is one of the reasons why Francis Coppola has to struggle to find out a suitable narrative structure for Apocalypse Now as a film adaptation of Heart of Darkness whose complex narrative structure has been examined in this paper. This is one of the main reasons why Apocalypse Now, Heart of Darkness the movie and King Kong are examined in this paper for the film adaptations of Heart of Darkness espacially in terms of its narrative strategy.

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