KINGSLEY AMIS'S lUCKY JIM Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

KINGSLEY AMISS lUCKY JIM - Essay ExampleIndeed, the harbour was dedicated to Larkin who had helped to inspire and to erase it.The genesis and reception of comfortable Jim can be found in The Letters of Kingsley Amis. His correspondence with Larkin traces the book through its earliest incarnations, when it was known Dixon & Christine and then The Man of Feeling. Here he is on March 3, 1953 writing, to LarkinIve c solelyed it flourishing Jim now, to empahsise the luck theme - epigraph Oh lucky Jim, How I envy him bis. ... Im afraid you are very much the grand reader of the thing and chaps like you dont grow on trees.Jim Dixons experience dramatizes the impinge between the middle-class case to invade a higher kindly stratum and the resultant guilt and self-contempt for abandoning unitys own class. A lower-middle-class youth who yearns for the economic security academic tenure affords, Jim earns a degree in an area he neither likes nor understands. By luck, he gets a job as a j unior lecturer in history at a provincial university. But it is bad luck, for not only does he shun the medieval history he teaches but he despises the cultural pretensions of his colleagues with whom he must curry favor, much(prenominal) as the Welches the pompous senior professor, his wife, and their artistic sons.The irony in all of this is that Jim Dixon doesnt feel at all lucky. Hes a junior lecturer at a no-account college in provincial England. His daily life-time is a litany of hilariously (from our perspective, anyway) petty humiliations at the hands of his superiors-notably the odious, conceited Professor Welch-his students and his co-dependent sort-of-girlfriend Margaret.One theme of Lucky Jim was getting good things wrong, Amis explained in an interview. Cultures good, but not the way the Welches did it. Education is good ... but it is self-defeating if it isnt done properly. (Firchow 27) He fails as an academic, but, with another dollop of luck (better this time), he gets a superior job removed the academy and, as a kind of added bonus (or revenge), wins from Bertrand Welch a young woman of superior mixer class. (Clive 20)Throughout Lucky Jim, Amis is concerned with the restructuring of British society which took place after World War II. nearly of the effects were intensively felt in the English education system through efforts to open educational opportunities to more members of the working and middle classes. The growth of the provincial universities and the decline of the influence of the culturally elite direct to friction between the old and the new orders. In Lucky Jim, such cultural change leads to conflict between Jim Dixon, a young history instructor, and Professor Welch, his department chair. Jim sees history as a doer of planning and preparing for a better future Welch sees it as a means of romanticizing and sentimentalizing the past. Amis expands this conflict through Jims interactions with his colleagues and acquaintances. We lch asks Jim to develop a lecture titled Merrie Olde England, a title which symbolizes the nature of the conflict. Welch tests Jim to see if he is willing to carry on a myth, while Jim and his fellow veterans are trying to cope with life, love and a new social order. The conflict between Jim as representative of a new England and Welch as defender of the old one expands to include Welchs family and some of Jims colleagues. As a weekend house