『로드 짐』의 서술전략

Abstract

Lord Jim is considered as one of the pioneers of British modernism due to its characteristic narrative strategy. However, the ethical implication of its narrative strategy has not been fully studied. The omniscient narrator is replaced by Marlow, character narrator, in chapter 5 in order to provide a language system suitable to the state of Jim's soul which could not be rendered by the Official Inquiry in the police court. Marlow's attitude to Jim is more important than Jim's action, because Jim is a simple character. Conrad used narrative techniques such as multiple narrative points of view and inversion of temporal chronology so as to emphasize the psychological development of Marlow towards Jim rather than the linear process of Jim's story. Marlow's attitude towards Jim had changed from curiosity to understanding, and then to sympathy, and then to trust, and then to pity until Jim became a symbolic figure to produce another story than that of other officers of the Patna. As Marlow tried to find a practical solution for Jim's case with a sense of responsibility, Stein offered a position of a trading-clerk in Patusan to Jim. Patusan became a second chance to Jim, who became a successful hero like one in the story book. In spite of Jim's brilliant achievement, Marlow could not get rid of the suspicion that the world outside the West could not be a place of destination for Jim. The intrusion of the imperial West as a person of Brown into Patusan made Jim to realize that he could not escape from the guilty past. The spoken language of Marlow is replaced by his written language in chapter 36. This narrative change indicates that the spoken language, upon which western metaphysics is based, has lost its power of public communication and that Jim's tragedy is not a personal failure but rather that of community, for which the practical remedy has not been found out yet and could not be expressed in a public language.