Lord Jim: A Romantic Hero in a Modernist Text

We often think of Lord Jim as a modernist novel and it's fragmented narrative, modernist metaphor and disillusionment. However, one critic has called Lord Jim a "modernist romance", in that the two modes of the modern and the romantic clash.

One considers how "disillusionment" and "idealisation" are handled in the play. Its publication in 1900 also marks a turning point between the 19th century and the 20th, and men have to negotiate both modes of understanding. Perhaps, the reason the narrative is fragmented is because Marlow's rational ways of understanding can never grasp the romantic mentality of Jim. Stein says that Jim is a "romantic" and hence cannot survive in the modern Western materialist world of the Empire. It is only in the world of Patusan that Jim can be his romantic self, where he can be viewed as wise, a savior, engage in fights and make a difference.

If Jim is the romantic hero, what does he over reach for? Perhaps his stubborn reaching for the romantic ideal in a world that no longer values such romantic qualities such as anti-rationality, extreme emotions of fear, idealism, heroism and imagination.

So perhaps what I'm trying to say is we should remember that works in itself do not fall into neat categories of "modern" simply because of the context in which we study them, but to also consider the way different literary movements had to write "against" the aesthetic influence of the period before.