It’s the 1950s and you’re an educated white male in the prime of his life – I’m sure you can just quit and get a different job on your way home. I understand that Amis was trying to make a point about pretentiousness and how universities can get too wrapped up in their own egos and pointless arguments, but as someone who couldn’t find a Phd position in Comparative Literature two years ago because of severe budget cuts, I struggle to sympathise with this protagonist’s plight. Instead of trying to turn things around and make something of his life, Jim spends his days getting away with doing as little work as possible, including avoiding the questions of students who do care and are actually trying to learn something. He is a lazy, judgmental coward who only chose medieval literature because it was “the soft option” and then complains that he’s stuck with a job he hates. Jim is not the little guy – he’s a whiny, privileged tit. Jim is supposed to be the little guy, the everyman who slowly gets the life choked out of him by the snobby establishment. However, here is my main problem the book: we are supposed to sympathise with and root for the main character. These characters are stereotypes, exaggerated cartoon versions of the people Amis himself encountered and loathed during his own university career.

In the end, he gets his rewards without making much of an effort and walks off into the sunset, having learned nothing at all.īefore you all grab your pitchforks to defend “the finest, and funniest, comic novel of the twentieth century” ( really?), let me just say: yes, I am aware that this is a satire.

Most of the novel is spent making silly faces, lying, avoiding his responsibilities, and playing immature pranks on the people he loathes. This book tells the story of a middle class white man in his early thirties working as a lecturer on medieval literature who thinks he deserves a better job and a prettier girlfriend, but spends most of his time complaining and drinking instead of actually working for either of these things.

Lucky jim novel