Scribd Logo
Upload

Welcome to Scribd!

  • 3 views

    Lord Jim

    Uploaded by

    Paula

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Lord Jim

    Uploaded by

    Paula
    3 views1 page

    Copyright

    © © All Rights Reserved

    Available Formats

    DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Did you find this document useful?

    Is this content inappropriate?

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    3 views1 page

    Lord Jim

    Uploaded by

    Paula

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    of 1

    Lord Jim

    b. Literary critics generally agree that the narrative technique of Lord Jim can be rather
    confusing and difficult to pin down. It is the story of a man called Marlow, who struggles to
    understand and tell the life story of a man named Jim, using a multitude of sources he pieces
    together, like a puzzle. He also filters the information and interprets it for the reader.
    Most of the novel is written using a third person limited point of view, a method of storytelling
    in which the narrator knows only the thoughts and feelings of one or a few characters, while
    other characters are presented only externally. It grants the writer more freedom than the first
    person, but less knowledge than third person omniscient. While using a third person point of
    view, limited or omniscient, the writer frequently uses the personal pronouns “he”, “she” and
    “they” in various cases: “when he came up into the light...”, “then he looked to the left” etc.
    Yet, as Marlow tells Jim’s story, other voices creep into the mix as the characters he meets share
    what they know of Jim. It is as if the narrator is channelling a story with multiple voices into one
    narrative stream. Lord Jim has many stories woven together and someone needs to tell them to
    the reader. This tough task falls to Marlow, who is also the narrative voice in Heart of Darkness.
    In order to create suspense, he often withholds information, offers the reader narrative blocks
    from a variety of sources, of different degrees of reliability and jumps from one moment in time
    to another. Time is broken up as the central character struggles with moral issues and the narrator
    tries to reproduce the natural flow of memories reproduced by human mind.
    All in all, the experimental nature of Conrad’s narrative, with the discontinuous narrative line,
    the use of multiple narrators and the emphasis on the form and the way in which the story is
    written, make Conrad a precursor of such literary towering figures as Virginia Woolf or James
    Joyce. Lord Jim is not only the story of a promising white young man who goes at sea, but also a
    novel about storytelling.

    You might also like