What is the role of time in Conrad's Heart of Darkness?

Question

What is the role of time in Conrad's Heart of Darkness? Where do we see a splitting of time, and how is the narrator unreliable?

Answer 1

Heart of Darkness is framed as a story within a story. The point of view belongs primarily to Charlie Marlow, who delivers the bulk of the narrative, but Marlow's point of view is in turn framed by that of an unnamed narrator who provides a first-person description of Marlow telling his story. The point of view can also be seen in a third consciousness in the book, that of Conrad himself, who tells the entire tale to the reader, deciding as author which details to put in and which to leave out. Beyond these three dominant points of view are the individual...
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In Joseph Conrad's novel, The Heart of Darkness, Charlie Marlow narrates the story of his journey into the dark continent, Africa. Through his experiences he learns a lot about himself and about the nature of mankind. He discovers that all humans have the capability within themselves to do good or evil. Outside circumstances substantially influence which path a human will take. Marlow travels not only through the darkness of Africa, but also through the darkness of the human soul.

England sent missionaries to help civilize the natives of Africa. To Marlow, this is the purpose of colonization. During his journey he comes to see how the Africans are exploited for their labor and the natural resources of the land. "They were dying slowly . . . nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation. . . brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time contracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest."
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Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, now his most famous work, was first published in 1899 in serial form in London’s Blackwood’s Magazine, a popular journal of its day. The work was well received by a somewhat perplexed Victorian audience. It has since been called by many the best short novel written in English. At the time of its writing (1890), the Polish-born Conrad had become a naturalized British citizen, mastered the English language, served for ten years in the British merchant marines, achieved the rank of captain, and traveled to Asia, Australia, India, and Africa. Heart of Darkness is based on Conrad’s firsthand experience of the Congo region of West Africa. Conrad was actually sent up the Congo River to an inner station to rescue a company agent—not named Kurtz but Georges-Antoine Klein—who died a few days later aboard ship. The story is told in the words of Charlie Marlow, a seaman, and filtered through the thoughts of an unidentified listening narrator. It is on one level about a voyage into the heart of the Belgian Congo, and on another about the journey into the soul of man. In 1902, Heart of Darkness was published in a separate volume along with two other stories by Conrad. Many critics consider the book a literary bridge between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and a forerunner both of modern literary techniques and approaches to the theme of the ambiguous nature of truth, evil, and morality. By presenting the reader with a clearly unreliable narrator whose interpretation of events is often open to question, Conrad forces the reader to take an active part in the story’s construction and to see and feel its events for him—or herself.
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Answer 2

We see time quickening the closer we get to Kurtz. It is a dramatic effect used by the author to show the urgency of the trip and catching Kurtz. Because the author is focused on the job of having the protaginist catch Kurtz, his vision is focused on that and disturbed as to things around him - making him an unreliable narrator. Pax - C.