Lord Jim has long been hailed as a masterpiece and like all canonical works it continues to respond to changing critical fashions and shifting explanatory paradigms. In a dream.” Marlow says in Heart of Darkness that “We live, as we dream – alone” but once Jim sets himself apart from his kind by a notorious act of apparent cowardice, his quest is to find a community in which he can open his eyes without being reminded of his shame.
In his own imagination, Jim is “always an example of devotion to duty, and as unflinching as a hero in a book” but as his mentor Stein explains, he does not know “how to be”: “He wants to be a saint and he wants to be a devil – and every time he shuts his eyes he sees himself as a very fine fellow – so fine as he can never be. Discussions of Conrad’s “free and wandering tale” over the past century can also be seen as an ongoing attempt to interpret the conflict between the romantic daydreams of a young British sailor and their consequences in the real world of colonial imperialism.
Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jim first appeared in book form in 1900, the same year as Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams.
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