Empire And Lord Jim

As 'a Polish nobleman cased in the British tar,' Joseph Conrad never escapes the influence of empire in his whole life: a Pole running away from the Russian Empire, a seaman and later a citizen of the British Empire. His particular view of empire and his portrayal of the European colonial adventurers in the exotic empires turned themselves into a series of classic works. Lord Jim is one of them.Since its publication in 1900, Lord Jim remains an unsolved mystery by its stylistic polyphony, chronological insecurity, generic hybridity, and ideological indeterminacy. This thesis tries, in the light of 'empire,' to reinterpret the 'break' between the two parts of Lord Jim, and to query a generally-held view of this novel as subversion of imperialist ideology, so as to bring forward a tentative locating of Conrad in postcolonial criticism.The Introduction traces the interpretive history of Lord Jim with the focus on the postcolonial background, the analysis of which leads to two arguments and a proposal this thesis attempts to fulfill.Chapter One defines the working sense of 'empire' from three dimensions-the temporal, the spatial and the ideological, with a brief survey of Eurocentrism and Ethnocentrism, two pillars of imperial thinking. Then it explores the textual presence of empire as the chief setting in Lord Jim.Chapter Two provides, on the basis of those recurrent episodes and ideas concerning empire, a new interpretation of the 'break' between the Patna episode and the Patusan episode in the narrative construction. The motivation of Jim's entry into and his success in Patusan bridges the 'break' between the two parts in demonstratingboth the coherence of plot generating from the deep narrative structure of 'lose-quest' (the Patna as 'Chance Lost' and Patusan as 'Chance Regained') and the inevitability of generic shift to adventure tale or imperial romance, in which Conrad's imperial thinking is unmasked.Chapter Three explores, through repetitions of images, episodes and ideas, the characterization of 'Lord' Jim as a faulty colonial lord. Many critics argue that Conrad employs discourse of domination to subvert imperialist ideology and cultural hegemony, but their studies are mostly confined to the relation between the whites and the natives. If Conrad does 'subvert,' actually no subversion is greater than the collapse of Jim's Patusan Empire. But such subversion turns out to be paradoxical, with its 'unsaid' premise deeply rooted in the imperial thinking. To confirm this argument, this chapter analyses Jim's death at the end of the novel.Chapter Four focuses on Conrad's complicated imperial experiences and the productive conditions of Lord Jim, with the emphasis on the dialogue between the author, the reader and society, so as to introduce a proposal of relocating Conrad the novelist in postcolonial criticism.