The Element of Mystery in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness

This study demonstrates how modern linguistics works within the framework of stylistics, with special reference to Conrad's Heart of Darkness. It is assumed that any detailed examination of the language of a literary text is a part of literary criticism. But within the linguistic branches, literary stylistics offers a close examination of the various levels of language (e.g. phonological, grammatical, lexical etc.) in a literary text. the researcher chose Joseph Conrad, the English novelist who received a severe attack from critics because of the ambiguous nature of his style. so this study tries to assess the outstanding features of Conrad¿s narrative style to find out a connection between the linguistic features and the mysterious atmosphere of his novel, Heart of Darkness. In short, this study examines the dynamics of handling the narrative style and the element of mystery in the novel.