Jim in Limbo

Edvard Munch, The Scream, 1895.    

This picture aptly conveys my general frustration with reading Conrad. With Heart of Darkness I found him excessively verbose, and although Lord Jim had a few bits of beautiful, poetic passages that I really loved, still, like Yuen Mei quipped, I kept getting lost in all the dialogue. My personal feelings aside, the second reason why this picture relates to Lord Jim for me is because of the overwhelming sense of crippled-ness in the text. 

Things seem to always hit a wall and fail here. Jim is a kind of cripple himself, having been injured by a falling spar. In Chapter 7, "[S]uch an overwhelming sense of his helplessness came over him that he was not able to produce a sound" (77). The sense of crippled-ness and things failing in the narration culminate to a point of frustration that screams silently out of the text, like the scream you can almost hear in Munch’s painting.   

But this picture also evokes a sort of limbo/liminal zone that figures in the text also occupy. The sea-farers occupy a liminal “existence between sky and water” (16), and the Patna is a mixed identity ship. Also, the narrative opens in medias res, and things are not revealed to readers in a linear fashion, even though it is narrated through a third-person omniscient narrator. Jim is also constantly in limbo between dream and reality. He is so caught up in his hero fantasies that he goes into a hissy fit when Marlow potentially insults his character.   

Relating this to modernism, perhaps all this silent screaming/crippled-ness stand for the modernist frustration/disillusionment with rapid technological progression and increasing social ills.   

(276 words)