Deixis and delayed decoding in Joseph Conrad’s Falk

Abstract

Conrad’s Falk portrays the act of cannibalism of a white man to propose that even resorting to cannibalism can find its moral justification within the society that abhors such actions. This effect is achieved by means of simultaneous narrative distance and involvement created through both deictic shifts in various narrative spaces (embedded within the main narrative space and constituting the textual world, subworlds and possible worlds with multiple spatio-temporal shifts) and delayed decoding which results in imperfect knowledge worlds delivered by the personal, justifying viewpoint of the intradiegetic narrator. As such, both deixis and delayed decoding, we argue, are ultimately related to the manipulation of narrative distance; they produce a kind of uncanny effect of simultaneous immediacy and distance which is fittingly in line with epistemological doubt as an aspect of modernist sensibility. © 2018, Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary.