Marlow: A Distant Reflector

Lord Jim is a famous work written by the Polish-English author, Joseph Conrad, which was completed in 1900 when English literature confronted the crossroads of realism and modernism. As an author at the turn of the century, Conrad not only adopts some writing ideas from the realism of English literature in the late 19th century, but also helps the development of the modernism in English literature in the early 20th century. The major difference between the modernity of Conrad's works and those of his contemporaries is that Conrad holds a different view on"truth". To be concrete, Conrad's works embody the objective truth of externality that is emphasized in Victorian Times, and meanwhile, they display the subjective truth of internality that is of great importance in modernist writing, so that the subject and the object are organically integrated in his works, and the internal world and the external world are well connected. In Lord Jim, the relationship between the subject and object is achieved by Marlow, the narrator of the story, and Jim, the protagonist, who act as a subject to reflect the world and an object that is reflected, respectively. Conrad puts Marlow between readers and Jim to make him act as a reflector to reflect the image of the protagonist, as well as to let him link the various impressions through his voice so that the impressions can be put in a certain order, in accordance with the law that man's mind records and reflects the outside world.I think that in order to display the"truth"to readers, Conrad in Lord Jim mainly uses the impressionist writing to represent the impressions, which is borrowed from the field of painting and broadens the way that a subject receives the outside world in the field of literature. When some scholars interpret Conrad's works, they will use impressionist approach to the visual effect and symbolic effect of the work, while this paper will use the impressionist ideas of Bergsonism, as well as Marlow's subjective experience, especially his perception and imagination, to interpret how Marlow's mental experience records and develops the impressions of Jim. Meanwhile, it will also be discussed how Conrad makes the impressions ambiguous when he describes the impressions so that readers can be active in exploring and interpreting the ambiguous or uncertain"truth". This process of interpretation will reveal Conrad's aesthetical view on"truth"and the modernist characters in his works. In the aspect of narratology, Conrad attaches great importance to the distance between readers and the fictional world, so he uses Marlow's voice instead of omniscient narrator. Marlow, then, is like a distant reflector, who reflects the image of Jim according to a certain rule, and barriers readers'sight, to make the image ambiguous and form the ambiguity and duration of impressionism.Regards of these problems, this paper will discuss Lord Jim of Conrad, which was written in the prime of Conrad's creation, via Marlow's subjective experience and narration, to interpret how Conrad develops impressions with a certain modernist features in his works. Then, we will well understand the contributions made by Conrad to the development of the modernism in English literature.