Joseph Conrad's Novel Lord Jim

Joseph Conrad's Novel Lord Jim

Joseph Conrad's novel Lord Jim tells the story of the young dreamer Jim, who at a young age had a promising future and dreamt with life in the ocean. Sea stories are a current theme on Conrad's work, as he passed part of his youth in the sea. However, the importance of the sea in his career does not come from the theme it gave to his work, but to the point of view the alienation of the sea gave to the Polish writer. Lord Jim goes beyond the regular stories of seamen and goes deeper in the psych of its protagonist.

Through the eyes of the narrator Marlow, the inner conflict of Jim is presented. The young man got a job on the boat Patna, which transports pilgrims, where he climbs to a higher position. After acting selfishly in an accident in the ocean, Jim abandons the group of pilgrims in the damaged boat. Along with some other officers, he claims that the boat had sunk. But Patna did not sink and all pilgrims were found alive. As a penalty for leaving them, Jim has his certification taken away.

According to Ian Watt, on his essay Joseph Conrad: alienation and commitment, "what has been considered man's most precious gift, consciousness, is really, therefore, a curse" (p. 3). That is one of Lord Jim's main themes, the constant struggle with consciousness. After jumping off Patna, Jim spends his whole life living with the guilt of leaving the pilgrims behind. His consciousness curses him until the end and he dies trying to prove he is a good person. He is obsessed with the idea of regaining his honor and does not realize the fact that everyone makes mistakes and needs to ignore his flaws to move on with his life.

Conrad himself said that he was a man who lost his gods, that reality was an illusion and that he lived in an unexplored universe of incertitudes. That lack of faith is clearly present in the character of Jim, who once was a young man who wanted to show his bravery and become a hero but when the opportunity came, he acted as a selfish man and worried only with his own life. In this man who ruined his life is present Conrad's skepticism towards the future of mankind.

Conrad's ideas about life are also represented on Jim's struggles: the author stated that "one must drag the ball and chain of one's selfhood to the end". That is exactly what happened with the protagonist of the novel, as even during the happy and pleasant moments of his life he was haunted with the ghosts of his past and carried them with him to his end. One lesson learned through the novel is that no man can run from his self-knowledge and that guilt can be a very destructive feeling. In this sense, Jim may be considered the protagonist and antagonist of the novel, as his battle was with his inner-self.

Watt claims that Conrad's self-consciousness led him to a life of loneliness and alienation, even though the author said that he would not live in an attic. But his financial needs created a dependence on public favor and he had to surrender to the publisher's desires. Fortunately he was accepted by the public even though he did not follow the literary modes of his time. He believed the public liked his work because he was true to the convictions that make life possible to humanity. On the contrary of the literature of the nineteenth century, Conrad did not believe in liberal reform or in the politics of the future, he was also skeptical about the utopianism of the past. He was also against using any kind of supernatural transcendence, myth or superstition, elements that do not appear on Lord Jim.

Alienation is present in the novel on the two main communities Jim lived in: Patna and Patusan. Patna was alienated because of the isolation brought by the sea, while Patusan was alienated by the tropical jungle life that surrounded it and also by the sea that surrounded it, as it was an island. The similarities between them are also clear in their name and in other points: both were ruled by Jim, and both suffer incidents. The difference is how Jim faced them: on Patna, he ran from the problem, but in Patusan he showed that he learned his lesson and faced it.

The alienation of the author is confronted in his work by the possibilities of commitment. Watt shows that to Conrad, commitment is "an endless process throughout history in which individuals are driven by circumstances into the traditional forms of human solidarity" (p. 14), that is, men need to accept that the relation with the outside world must be set by fidelity, the inner self must act only