How Jim Individuates his Shadow and His Animus in Treasure Island - Essay Example

The lack of transcendence or wholeness can be seen as holding Jim back from becoming mature, as those unconscious aspects threaten to derail him and to keep him in the dark, so to speak, and eventually has the capacity to ruin him. In the novel, it was clear that in the end, he did achieve some measure of transcendence, because we see him maturing as the story proceeded, from sheltered boy cowering behind her mother to a person on his own, a cabin boy in a ship, to captain, once they were able to get back that ship from the hands of pirates. This career would not have been possible, in a way, if Jim had not been able to navigate the treacherous path to maturity. That navigation entailed being able to integrate the twin aspects of his being that were disparate at the beginning, namely the animus and the shadow. The focus of this exploration is on chapters 23 through 34 of the book (Stevenson; SparkNotes LLC).

            The individuation of Jim’s shadow is one that does not proceed in a straight line but transpires in fits and starts. Jim the boy at one point would launch himself into whimsical adventures, as when in the early goings for instance, in chapter 23, he pulled himself to the window of the ship where the pirates could have seen him, just because he wanted to when the safer course would have been to stay hidden. On the other hand, in later chapters, he would prove his mastery of himself, by first being able to take control of the ship, then being able to take control of it as captain with Hands, who he would go on to have a struggle with for control. Hands would hurt him with the knife, but Jim would prevail in the end. We can see this seminal struggle as Jim’s own rite of passage from a young boy not totally in control of his shadow, to a man who has been able to harness his powers in order to advance himself and live out the hero’s life that was his. In this way, we see that on one level, Jim’s journey towards the captain’s role and the taking of the spoils of the ship is also a story of one maturing and being able to integrate those aspects of his shadow that he must wrestle with, in order to mature. In contrast, the novel depicts the pirates as men who seem to have grown old, without achieving this individuation, stuck in a kind of infancy even as they were outwardly mature and tough. They seem to exist on a plane of existence that has no inwardness or sense of awareness of their own evil, and good. The evidence of Jim’s individuating his shadow successfully is in his ascension to ship captain and his early successful struggle with Hands (Stevenson; SparkNotes LLC (b)).

            The individuation of Jim’s own animus, on the other hand, can be gleaned in the later chapters. It can be gleaned from the way he wakes up to those aspects of the figures of respect that he had in the journey, such as Dr. Livesey, that are not as respectable as he expected. In the later chapters, Dr. Livesey can be construed as occupying less and less of a central role in the way Jim came to understand and to live up to the animus aspects of his being that see reality and people not in black and white moral lenses, but in shades of grey. Silver here is seen in the later chapters arguably as someone who is more human and flesh and blood, meaning that he has both good and bad in him.