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The field of Conradian criticism has undergone great changes in
recent decades. The labels attached to his works by previous
critics as merely adventurous stories or his personal journals
have been discarded. Recent criticisms are now emphasized on
the complexity of the plots and multiple themes of his
fictions. The purpose of my thesis is to explore how Conrad,
through the ambivalence of the character-narrator Marlow in
Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, expresses his double visions as
well as his aesthetic aim to make us see the world
dialectically. The first chapter is an introduction to Conrad
the artist and his aesthetic views. Conrad's doubleness is a
recognized feature in his artistic works, especially in the so-
called Marlovian fictions. In those fictions, by the invention
of a self-contradictory narrator Marlow, Conrad speaks out his
double visions as well as his dialectical view toward truth and
human existence. Through Marlow's ambivalence and his
inconclusive story telling, Conrad offers us a higher level of
truth--not the factual truth, but the truth of imagination.
Chapter two focuses on Marlow's ambivalence in Heart of
Darkness. Through Marlow's Congo journey and his exposure to
Kurtz, Conrad leads us to the exploration of the paradoxes of
morality and human nature. The third chapter debates the
ambiguityies and contradictions in human experiences as
exhibited in another Marlovian fictions, Lord Jim. Through
Marlow's obscurantism, Conrad shows us the complexity of human
experiences and the difficulty of a definite judgment. The last
chapter is the conclusion of my thesis. Finally, I'd like to
define his art as an art of dialectics in which no sense of an
ending is achieved in the text. Thus, the aesthetic value of
his art lies not on its ending, but on the search itself.
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