Talk:Lord Jim

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Novels This article is within the scope of WikiProject Novels, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to narrative novels, novellas, novelettes and short stories on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit one of the articles mentioned below, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and contribute to the general Project discussion to talk over new ideas and suggestions.
B This article has been rated as B-Class.
High This article has been rated as High-importance on the importance scale.
This article has an incomplete infobox template! - see Novels InfoboxCode or Short Story InfoboxCode for a pattern

I am removing the following statement from the article because it seems highly problematic to me:

"Lord Jim is widely considered a post-colonial novel because it deals with Africa and Asia and looks at them through an acultural point of view."

The problems that I see:

  • The novel has extremely little to say about Africa (Madagascar is mentioned peripherally three times, and that is the only mention of Africa that I am aware of).
  • The point of view of the novel is far from acultural: it is entirely European.
  • The novel is set and written in the colonial period, not the post-colonial period.
  • As for the book being "widely considered" to be a post-colonial novel, I can find no reference to such a position on the web, except in mirrors of the Wikipedia text. I would therefore categorize the whole statement as unverifiable, as defined by the Wikipedia policies.

If there's someone who knows something I don't know about this topic, feel free to undo my deletion.67.186.28.212 23:46, 21 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] 2006 Egyption Ferry Disaster

Not sure where it should go but I immediately thought this bore an erie resemblance to the early reports of what happened on the ferry, with the crew getting off the boat while assuring those left that everything is fine. M/V al-Salam Boccaccio 98

[edit] Just right !

Yes, I also cannot see any post-colonial point in the entire book. There is no deal with Africa and Asia either. It's a story of a wounded heart and soul, nothing else.

[edit] edited plot summary

I disagree with the previous editor's remark that Marlow befriends Jim and listens to his story "out of incredulous curiosity of Jim's motives." Marlow explicitly denies that his motivation is curiosity: "You may call it an unhealthy curiosity if you like; but I have a distinct notion I wished to find something. Perhaps, unconsciously, I hoped I would find that something, some profound and redeeming cause, some merciful explanation, some convincing shadow of an excuse." 67.186.28.212 15:36, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

This should be noted: Mr. Norman Sherry wrote, Conrad and His World, which profiled novelist Joseph Conrad. For it, the young Sherry went to Singapore and sifted through more than 60 years of 19th-century editions of The Straits Times to finally find the front-page story of a ship carrying Muslim pilgrims abandoned at sea by their British crew -- the basis for Conrad’s Lord Jim. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 157.157.187.157 (talk) 16:30, August 21, 2007 (UTC)