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Discourse structure of 1st and 3rd person novels
Our answer to task B
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Addresser 1
(Joseph Conrad)
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Message
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Addressee 1
(Reader)
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Addresser 2
(anonymous I-narrator)
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Message
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Addressee 2
(Reader)
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Addresser 3
(Marlowe as I-narrator)
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Message
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Addressee 3
(Marlowe's shipmates)
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Addresser 4
(Marlowe as character)
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Message
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Addressee 4
(Kurtz)
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For most of the story we need four levels of discourse to account for
what is going on. The effect of this, and in particular the 'framing'
at the beginning and end of the story makes it clear that this story has
the kind of status that stories introduced as originating from 'a friend
of a friend' - they have to be taken with a pinch of salt! At the beginning
of the story, when we are more aware of the presence of the narrator we
will feel as if we are 'overhearing' at third hand the story Marlowe tells
to his shipmates. He addresses them, not us. But as the tale proceeds
we may well begin to forget about his shipmates, in spite of the other
narrator's paragraph-initial quotation marks. So it soon feels as if he
is telling the tale directly to us, even though we know that this is really
not the case. In other words, the right-hand side of the top three
levels of the discourse diagram will begin to 'collapse' into one another
as we forget about Marlowe's shipmates. So the reader's assumed discourse
structure changes as the novella progresses, getting us more and more
involved in the story. But at the end the frame device will restore the
whole structure, as outlined above, leaving us to wonder whether we should
have been believing what we have been told. Because Marlowe is the 1st-person
narrator telling the tale, we are likely to want to sympathise with his
viewpoint when he reports what he did or felt as a character in his own
tale because of the discourse collapsing between levels 3 and 4 on the
left-hand side of the diagram.
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