Why a Frame Tale?

Conrad's writing is one of the most difficult writing anyone will have to understand. It is very hard to understand, just by reading it once. With long, complex sentences, the novel is hard to comprehend. Conrad uses the style of a frame tale to get his story across to the reader. This also makes the novel difficult because even though Marlow is speaking most of the type, the unnamed narrator jumps in the story a few times (in the beginning, a little in Part 2, and at the end). My question is: Why did Conrad use this style of writing in this story? He could have easily just have had Marlow talk the entire story, but instead he had the unnamed narrator talk as well. Why is that?

Comments

[anon]

The point of the frame narrator is to displace the 'authoritative' narrative voice, the sage like pronouncements of 'universal truth' that can be seen in Victorian writers such as Carlyle or Ruskin.

Throughout Conrad's works it is possible to see an obsession with the moment of telling, with the meta-fictional problem of 'narrating'. This is a point missed by critics even as recently as Leavis (The Great Tradition) or Berthoud (The Major Phase), who wish to reduce Conrad into ideological terms (e.g. HD as a novel of racism or sexism).

The succession of intra-homodiegetic narrators (narrators who are all contained within the fictional frame of the story itself) means that it is possible to see HD in similar terms to which the frame narrator describes Marlow,

‘But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of those misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine’ (I. p.8)

I think the meaning in all of Conrad's novels is to be found outside 'enveloping the tale', hence why it is so difficult to reduce him into ideological terms (even in his so called political novels, such as Nostromo or The Secret Agent).