The Narrative Methods Of Lord Jim

Lord Jim (1900) is one of important works of Joseph Conrad, the renowned Britain novelist, who has Polish descent. Conrad, as a writer, played a vital role in the transformation from traditional English novel to modernistic novel at the turn of 19th century and 20th century. Conrad wrote many famous works, and Lord Jim is by no means the most brilliant one, which is commented as the first modernistic novel in Britain's 20th literature album, because Conrad took up a completely new method in writing it.As we all know, Lord Jim is a rather complex, confusing book to read. One reason dues to the narrative methods that Conrad has adopted. Conrad overthrew the traditional narrative pattern in most of his fiction works, especially in Lord Jim where he used his skills to an extreme extent. However, Conrad is not just a experimental novelist, who claims "art for art's sake", there are many profoundly themes in his works. So does Lord Jim, in which we can see him torturing the heart of human being, and probably including his own. Through the test of time, Lord Jim now is a canon in world literature.My dissertation aims to firstly analyze interior text of Lord Jim, including the self-interpretative elements, narrative structure and narrative time. Then the text adopts a broader point of view: from the view of new narratologies, it studies further aspects of this text, and by studying the modernistic composing skills used by Conrad, I hope further to interpret the contribution that Conrad done to the English novel history as well as the position that he should have.