He is compelled by one final infamy suffered in Patusan, his last frontier, where in his thinking he had escaped from bullying from invisible forces, to admit that ‘there is nothing to fight for’. And he is prepared to defend this fiction with all violence if it be challenged. But although his ego-ideal has unravelled before his own eyes at least once before, he amazingly clings to a self-image that is the exact opposite of who he is.
Narrator jim conrad trial#
The trial that Jim is exposed to is as if designed by the higher powers, which invests his story with the air of a sublime tragedy, being that he is confronted by ‘more than man’. He is clearly aware of the extent of the disaster and sees that there is nothing any more to fight for. In his own test, which is deliberately set up as a police sting operation, Obi Okonkwo is defeated in all his ideals, his self-image reduced to rags. In Conrad’s Lord Jim and Achebe’s No Longer at Ease, for instance, the heroes, both idealists, though of different tempers, experience the same kind of test of which the consequences of failure are a tragic reversal of fortunes. However, there are significant patterns of similarity that run among some of their works. The traditional mythological background (Biblical myths, Greek myths and Jim’s dyed-in-the-wool romantic world of values) thus co-operates with the embedded narratives and rumours in a process of mythologisation, in the structuralist sense of the word “myth”, giving birth to the writing of “this amazing Jim-myth” (168).Īlthough Chinua Achebe acknowledges Conrad’s works to be ‘permanent literature’, his hostility towards them, especially Heart of Darkness, is well known for he maintains that they have a racist sub-text. Lord Jim is also famous for its intricate narrative structure mediated by the voice of these speakers. Besides, the plot itself is made up of multiple layers of reports, both oral and written, produced by a great variety of witnesses and speakers. Conrad always makes clear the fact that Jim is evolving in a fictional universe. In Lord Jim the mythical allusions play a particular role in that they serve as a backdrop, or even a standard, against which Jim’s character, his thoughts and actions, are measured.
It comes therefore as no surprise to find his novels replete with mythological references. His father, Apollo Korzeniowski, was a poet who translated, among others, Vigny, Hugo, and Shakespeare (and Jim has in his possession “a half-crown complete Shakespeare”, 143). Although Joseph Conrad was born in the eastern part of Europe, he was fully aware of the classical literary background of the West.
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