Conrad's epoch-making novel, Heart of Darkness, yields to a multiplicity of interpretations by a multiplicity of interpretive communities. Replete with a characteristic duplicity of language, thought, and perception, the text is stubbornly self-elusive and inherently ambiguous. Critics in the past, notably, Chinua Achebe, have mostly provided a unidirectional interpretation to the text, thereby, consciously or unconsciously, undermining and negating other possible interpretations. However, the poststructuralist approach recognizes Conrad's narrative in the light of plurisignation. Accordingly, the narrative propels the reader towards the welter of undecidable possibilities, towards an intellectual deadlock or aporia. Particularly, it identifies the fact that Conrad, above all, has attempted to unravel the corrupt Eurocentric mind that perceives the Africans as a degenerate race. And Conrad finally emerges more as an unbiased "racialist" than a prejudiced "racist" that writers like Achebe conceive him to be.

Chinua Achebe's famous essay, "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness", identifies Conrad as a "bloody (modified later as `thoroughgoing') racist" (2005: 7). The narrative technique of Conrad turns out to be Achebe's vantage point. Accordingly, an anguished Achebe finds his much-debated African discourse thoroughly biased, eurocentric, and discriminatory. The text, nonetheless, is replete with a plethora of contrasting elements, which facilitate a poststructural reading and facilitate a deconstructive view of this polemical Achebian notion. By making a deconstructive study of the text, this article explores the self-effacing persona of Conrad's narrative and the multidimensional paradigm it provides.

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