Contents introduction

Chapter II.About Kingsley Amis’s ,,Lucky Jim’’.

2.1.Characters of Kingsley Amis’ ,,Lucky Jim’’.

Lucky Jim is a novel by Kingsley Amis, first published in 1954 by Victor Gollancz. It was Amis's first novel and won the 1955 Somerset Maugham Award for fiction. The novel follows the exploits of the eponymous James (Jim) Dixon, a reluctant lecturer at an unnamed provincial English university. It is supposed that Amis arrived at Dixon's surname from 12 Dixon Drive, Leicester, the address of Philip Larkin from 1948 to 1950, while he was a librarian at the university there.^[1] Lucky Jim is dedicated to Larkin, who helped to inspire the main character and contributed significantly to the structure of the novel. Time magazine included Lucky Jim in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. Jim Dixon is a lecturer in medieval history at a red brick university in the English Midlands. He has made an unsure start and, towards the end of the academic year, is concerned about losing his probationary position in the department. In his attempt to be awarded a permanent post he tries to maintain a good relationship with his absent-minded head of department, Professor Welch. To establish his credentials he must also ensure the publication of his first scholarly article, but he eventually discovers that the editor to whom he submitted it has translated it into Italian and passed it off as his own. Dixon struggles with an on-again off-again "girlfriend", Margaret Peel, a fellow lecturer who is recovering from a suicide attempt in the wake of a broken relationship with another man. Margaret employs emotional blackmail to appeal to Dixon's sense of duty and pity while keeping him in an ambiguous and sexless limbo. While she is staying with Professor Welch, he holds a musical weekend that seems to offer an opportunity for Dixon to advance his standing among his colleagues. The attempt goes wrong, however, and the drunken Dixon drops a lighted cigarette on the bed, burning a hole in the sheets. During the same weekend Dixon meets Christine Callaghan, a young Londoner and the latest girlfriend of Professor Welch's son, Bertrand, an amateur painter whose affectedness particularly infuriates Dixon. After a bad start Dixon realises that he is attracted to Christine, who is far less pretentious than she initially appears. Dixon's growing closeness to Christine upsets Bertrand, who is using her to reach her well-connected Scottish uncle and get a job from him. Then Dixon rescues Christine from the university's annual dance after Bertrand treats her offhandedly, and takes her home in a taxi. The pair kiss and make a date for later, but Christine admits that she feels guilty about seeing Dixon behind Bertrand's back and about Dixon's supposed relationship with Margaret. The two decide not to see each other again, but when Bertrand calls on Dixon to "warn him off the grass" he cannot resist the temptation to quarrel with Bertrand, until they fight. The novel reaches its climax during Dixon's public lecture on "Merrie England". Having attempted to calm his nerves by drinking too much, he caps his uncertain performance by denouncing the university culture of arty pretentiousness and passes out. Welch lets Dixon know privately that his employment will not be extended, but Christine's uncle offers Dixon the coveted job of assisting him in London. Later Dixon meets Margaret's ex-boyfriend, who reveals that he had not been her fiancé, as she had claimed. Comparing notes, the two realise that the suicide attempt was faked as a piece of neurotic emotional blackmail. Feeling free of Margaret at last, Dixon responds to Christine's phoned request to see her off as she leaves for London. There he learns from her that she is leaving Bertrand after being told that he was having an affair with the wife of one of Dixon's former colleagues. They decide to leave for London together, and then walk off arm in arm, outraging the Welches as they pass on the street. When originally published, Lucky Jim received enthusiastic reviews. In the New Statesman, Walter Allen wrote, "Mr Amis has an unwaveringly merciless eye for the bogus: some aspects of provincial culture – the madrigals and recorders of Professor Welch, for instance – are pinned down as accurately as they have ever been; and he has, too, an eye for character – the female lecturer Margaret, who battens neurotically on Jim's pity, is quite horribly well done. Mr Amis is a novelist of formidable and uncomfortable talent."

W. Somerset Maugham praised Amis' writing while disdaining the new generation he represented: "Mr. Kingsley Amis is so talented, his observation is so keen, that you cannot fail to be convinced that the young men he so brilliantly describes truly represent the class with which his novel is concerned... They have no manners, and are woefully unable to deal with any social predicament. Their idea of a celebration is to go to a public bar and drink six beers. They are mean, malicious and envious... They are scum." In response to Maugham's criticism of the new generation, the New Statesman and The Nation held contests to get readers to respond to Maugham in the voice of Jim Dixon. Retrospective reviews have solidified its legacy as one of Amis' finest novels. Christopher Hitchens described it as the funniest book of the second half of the 20th century, writing: "Lucky Jim illustrates a crucial human difference between the little guy and the small man. And Dixon, like his creator, was no clown but a man of feeling after all." Olivia Laing, writing in The Guardian: "Remarkable for its relentless skewering of artifice and pretension, Lucky Jim also contains some of the finest comic set pieces in the language." Margaret Drabble, writing in the New Statesman, wrote about the allusions between the character of Magaret Peel and that of Philip Larkin's relationship with Monica Jones: "The version of Monica as Margaret Peel, a needy, dowdy academic spinster, was the version that first lodged in my consciousness, as a scarecrow alarming enough to warn any woman off the academic life". Before we get to why Jim was so lucky, let's talk shop. Kingsley Amis was part of a 1950s literary movement that was known as the "Angry Young Men," a group of anti-establishment British writers who wrote biting satire about different aspects of British society. Kind of like the American Beat Generation Writers, but with cooler accents. Amis eventually became one of England's most productive and famous writers. He wrote everything: poetry, essays, novels, sci-fi, even some James Bond fan fiction. Published in 1954, Lucky Jim was Amis's way of mocking England's "redbrick" universities, which were built in industrial towns just before World War I to help regular folks get an education. But even in these colleges with plenty of working class and middle class students, Amis saw stuffy British culture completely choking the energy out of everyday life—especially the life of a young man who might prefer glasses of beer to cups of tea. "Prefer" being a massive understatement here. Through Jim's observations, Amis does a satirical number on British university life of the 1950s. With its bumbling professors and silly lecturers, Amis makes us wonder why anyone would ever take the university seriously as an institution. (Shmoop disclaimer: Stay in school.) Kingsley Amis was just a young man himself—not long out of college—when he wrote this book. He taught at a college not unlike Jim Dixon's, so he was really familiar with the kinds of characters he was satirizing. It doesn't take long to realize that Jim Dixon's an angry young man himself. He wants to play by his own rules, but to keep his job he has to play by the rules of people he detests. He's annoyed—no, make that infuriated—by 90 percent of the people he meets—no, make that 95 percent—and has to put up with a parade of boring, pretentious snobs and posers. And his sometime-girlfriend is a master manipulator. Jim's favorite coping strategy for all this? Deep breathing and meditation. Oh wait. We mean drinking himself into a stupor. Yep, our hero Jim Dixon's a drunkard. Jim tries to be inebriated as often as his paltry salary will allow. Going through life in an alcohol fog eventually wreaks havoc on his academic career via a disastrous, but hilarious, drunk lecture. But in the end, despite his many flaws, Jim gets the pretty girl, the job, and the last laugh. In public, Jim kowtows to the powers-that-be. In private, he mimics their way of talking, makes crazy faces, and rants at the universe. We can relate. Especially in high school and college, most of us have serious constraints on our behavior by the folks in authority. Isn't that what most YA fiction is about? Of course, far be it from Shmoop to advocate an "anything goes" lifestyle or feral existence. But it's important nonetheless to try to remain honest and self-respecting even when surrounded by idiots—even if we do fantasize about taking a few of them down. Amis seems to suggest that the only possible way to cope with these insufferable people and ridiculous situations is to remain as drunk as possible for as long as possible. At least, that's what Jim Dixon does, because he feels completely out of control of his future. But in the end, that doesn't help at all. (He's lucky to be alive at all after passing out in bed while smoking a cigarette.) What does eventually rescue Jim, and maybe us, is a little bold action and risk-taking. Jim starts his own small personal revolution after he decides he's just not gonna take it anymore. Jim is a lecturer in the History department at a college in the Southern part of London. As a character, he is remarkably normal, having no outstanding qualities, dreams or talents. In the beginning of the novel, it is let to be understood that he has no control over his life whatsoever and that every decision he takes is just fate. When Jim tries to take his own decisions and control his life, he finds himself unable to do it most of the time because he is influenced by other characters and manipulated to do certain things he does not want to do. Jim is unable to fit in with the wealthy people around him and he always manages to somehow make a fool of himself because he says the wrong things and behaves in a way he should have not. Jim is concerned about not hurting Margaret and because of this he does everything he can to shelter her. When he finds that he was the one played and that Margaret was just manipulating him, he finally decides to follow his dreams and take his life into his own hands.