• English & American cultural studies
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.221-237
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• 2009

This paper analyzes the time-shift technique in Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim. Conrad's manipulation of time in this novel is based on his aspiration for how 'to make you see,' which he believes is completed through the harmony form and substance in his works. So Conrad applies this technique which was used earlier by some writers such as Laurence Sterne to his Lord Jim to show its theme more effectively. In Lord Jim, the story consists of two parts; first, Jim jumps from a ship called the Patna and is deprived of his navigation certificate. Secondly, he wins the people's respect in Patusan in which his past related to the Patna remains hidden, but he faces his death by taking responsibility for the death of the chief's son in the island. These events in Lord Jim are not described in chronological order; that is, some events are depicted with the time-shift technique using flashback, association, or fragmentary memory to accelerate the speed of stories as well as to offer the actuality of the events. With this structure, the themes of Jim's story have something to do with his heroic actions and failures. Jim wants to be a hero and after failures he struggles to redeem himself only to fail. In particular, Jim's jump from the Patna is emphasized through the time-shift and it shows there is something incomprehensible in his action. Therefore, Conrad reveals in Lord Jim that Jim is one of us who not only are imperfect but also have the weaknesses inside that can unexpectedly emerge in an instant.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.1
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• pp.61-82
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• 2009

This paper aims to reexamine the issue of racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, especially in the light of Chinua Achebe's critique of the novella as a racist text entrenched with European prejudices of Africa and its people in his 1975 speech at the University of Massachusetts titled "An Image of Africa." While the novella's indictment of imperial exploitation has been noted from an early stage of its critical reception, its racism had hardly been discussed until Chinua Achebe posed it. Achebe offers the canonized status of the text as a modernist classic, "the most commonly prescribed novel in twentieth-century literature courses," as one reason for its obvious manifestations of racism being glossed over. One may add that Conrad's militant denunciation of imperialist enterprises as "a sordid farce," his seemingly radical stance against imperialism, serves as ideological constraints upon his readers, blinding them to its immanent racism. A closer look at the novella's attack on imperialism turns out to be contradictory, for it also shows such liberal-humanist ideas as the civilizing mission, the work ethic, and the superiority of civilized man, all of which served to prop up European imperialism at the end of the nineteenth century. This ideological contradiction also accounts for Conrad's racist attitude, which is betrayed in his portrayal of Africans as obscure, primitive. Euro-American imperialism has frequently justified itself by recourse to racism, but racism has not always been allied with imperialism. Some staunch racists such as Robert Knox and Arthur de Gobineau went against imperialism, and Conrad proves one of such cases whose critique of imperialism is voiced in ways that can be characterized as racist.