Lord JIm ed Eumenidi di Eschilo. Un'ipotesi interpretativa

In the present essay it will be suggested that in the structure of Lord Jim we can find traces of the author’s search for a literary form more suited than adventure to give representation to the contradictions emerging by the late 1890s in the imperial project. This form, it will be argued, was Greek tragedy. I will base my interpretative hypothesis on a parallel reading of Lord Jim and The Eumenides, two works that give representation to an opposition between an old and a new law – in the case of Conrad’s late nineteenth-century adventure novel, between British maritime law and an ancestral law of retaliation. In the pages that follow, the tragic model, based on the chorus-hero dynamics will be applied to a re-examination of Marlow’s function in the novel.