Lord Jim analysis

A detailed Summary of Lord Jim analysis

The opening chapters of Lord Jim make reference to three distinct moments in time: the apparent present time of Jim's employment as a water-clerk, a continuous span of years in the past from the time he leaves home to his shipping aboard the Patna, and a moment that seems to be in the future, when he will leave the seaside and venture into the Malay forest. The as-yet-unnamed narrator, whom we will meet in Chapter 4, seems to have a nearly omnipotent knowledge of Jim's story; he hints that we will see him transform from "just Jim" to "Tuan Jim," or "Lord Jim," although he offers no clues as to how this will occur. For the time being, the narrator instead invokes a series of literary paradigms within which Jim's story may or may not fit. First, the story begins in medias res, or in the middle of things, in the interlude between the two major episodes of the novel. This is the classic opening strategy of novels within the epic genre. Will Jim's story prove to be an epic, perhaps like Homer's Odyssey, another work which begins with a displaced sailor far from home? The marked interest in only one individual--Jim--and the lack of any secondary characters means that this will not be a classical epic, since classical epic is typicall

This is also a section heavier in symbolism than most. The fog which envelops Brown and his men as they head downriver contrasts with the extreme clarity with which Marlow last sees Jim, on the beach with the fishermen. It is also indicative of the amorphous morality of both Brown's and Jim's actions. Brown, after all, thinks he has been double-crossed, based on the information Cornelius has given him. Jim, as we have already seen, is caught in a bind. The night of the Patna's accident was crystal-clear and still; nothing should have obscured Jim's decision-making then. Because he failed then, yet has held on to his ideals, situations no longer have clear solutions. Brown, too, although he seems to be acting logically, is also punished, by being shipwrecked soon afterward and dying a long, drawn-out death. Weather, though, is the primary vehicle for symbolic content. When the fog clears off, Tamb'Itam reports, the sky is in turmoil. Marlow attributes this to a cyclone passing nearby. This is another moment when romance and realism are at odds. In a romantic world, the cyclone would have descended upon Patusan at the moment of Jim's death, symbolizing the disorder in the world that led to the destruction of our hero. In a realistic world, weather would be ordinary and meaningless. The cyclone's close approach suggests a failure of both models; somehow, Jim's death must be given import, yet the issues surrounding it are too muddled and romance too outmoded for the full symbolic performance to occur. This cyclone should be contrasted to the squall that hits the Patna, as well as to the rumored hurricane that wipes out Chester and Robinson's guano-collecting expedition to the Walpole Reef. Here, finally, the storm--the symbol of higher powers or order--fails to impose its meaning

y more interested in sweeping social events involving groups of people. The sketch of Jim's early life and education suggest that Lord Jim may share features with biography, or perhaps bildungsroman (a genre which looks at the education and maturation of an individual). The bildungsroman often seeks to trace an individual's development through his or her reading, which is certainly the case here, although Jim is reading light popular literature rather than the more serious tomes usually cited in this genre. The reiterated attention to Jim's propensity for daydreaming and the emphasis on his innate "Ability" are, in their way, tropes of Romanticism, a mode that requires imagination and inborn genius above all else in its heroes. Finally, too, there is a certain pre-modernist aspect to Jim's introduction. Like Leopold Bloom in Ulysses, Jim derives many of his ideas from popular literature and culture. Conrad's language, too, with its density of abstract terms (the "keen perception of the Intolerable," for example) and local allusions (Rangoon, Penang, Batavia), can be difficult in the same way as the language of Virginia Woolf or William Faulkner.

Marlow's interpretation of Jim shifts dramatically during this section. As he is leaving Patusan, he sees Jim, standing on the beach, as "the heart of a vast enigma." In the letter to his friend, however, he declares that Jim is no longer the "white speck at the heart of an immense mystery" but "of full stature, standing disregarded. . .with a stern and romantic aspect, but always mute, dark--under a cloud." Marlow's initial evalu

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Approximate Word count = 2273
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Novels