Lord Jim's Mythological Journey

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The hero sets forth on a journey to distant lands, away from home, he or she is urged by an inside appeal, that mythologists and archetypal theorists refer to as “the call to adventure,” in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell explains that: This first stage of the mythological journey—which we have designated the "call to adventure" —signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown. (53) In Lord Jim, Jim spends some weeks in a hospital in Singapore after being injured by a falling spar, there, the breeze “brought into the bare room the softness of the sky, the languor of the earth, the bewitching breath of the Eastern waters” (15).

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