ABSTRACT
The Author’s Note to Lord Jim tells us that ‘acute consciousness of lost honour’ is the novel’s subject. One way of not experiencing Lord Jim would be to grind it to powder and emerge with a few solid chunks of matter bearing labels like ‘Honour’ and ‘Solidarity’. It is more fruitful and more interesting to pursue the matter comparatively: to consider the way honour has been dramatized in literary works, which may throw light on Lord Jim. Hamlet is, of course, the William Shakespeare play closest to Lord Jim. Jim’s body disobeys him at the crucial moments of his early career. Hamlet fails to act, Jim acts; but in his account of the action Jim stresses his passivity. Jim is a romantic hero and a hero in a drama of honour. Lord Jim is a tragedy because it elicits in us the painful mix of responses described; the dramatizations of Razumov and Heyst again elicit equivalent painful mixtures of response.
