Jim Dixon

Character Analysis

The Hero

Despite his flaws, it's hard not to like good ol' Jim Dixon. After all, who among us would really want to spend an entire weekend hanging out with Professor Welch and singing medieval songs? Who'd really want to date Margaret Peel or have to deal with Bertrand Welch? When it comes down to it, most of us probably dislike pretentious people just as much as Jim does, and for that reason, we might tend to look the other way on some of his less desirable characteristics—and there are many.

We don't get much back-story on Jim. We know he's in his mid-twenties, just out of the RAF and college, and that he comes from a modest background. We learn that he had a traumatic and humiliating experience in a school play as a youngster that didn't help his self-confidence. And Amis tells us he's "well-schooled in giving apologies at the very times when he ought to be demanding them" (17.79). He seems to be someone who's always had to squelch his real feelings. And he's always had a tendency to drink way too much.

In general, he's an unhappy guy. There's a poignant moment at the end of the novel when Christine has left Bertrand to be with Jim:

He thought what a pity it was that all his faces were designed to express rage or loathing. Now that something had happened which really deserved a face, he'd none to celebrate it. (25.61)

How does Amis succeed in making this cranky drunk a sympathetic character? We probably identify with Jim because the guy has to suffer in the company of boring, pretentious, and self-absorbed people. We root for Jim as he tries to bring phonies like this down a peg or two.

The Cynic

Jim's cynical thoughts and attitudes about nearly everything are the comic device that drives the novel. He's an equal-opportunity hater; very few characters escape his contempt. From page one, we see how he detests his boss, Professor Welch:

"I don't know, Professor," he said in sober veracity. No other professor in Great Britain, he thought, set such store by being called Professor." (1.2)

On Margaret, his "girlfriend":

How would she behave when they were alone together? Would she be gay, pretending she'd forgotten, or had never noticed, the length of time since he last saw her, gaining altitude before she dipped into the attack? (1.18)

He's cynical about the whole relationship business. Reflecting on some song lyrics he'd just been forced to sing:

But if he'd meant what he seemed to mean by "kind affections due", then Dixon had never "looked for" any of these things from Margaret. Perhaps he should: after all, people were doing it all the time. It was a pity she wasn't better-looking. One of these days he would try, though, and see what happened. (4.5)

He doesn't trust the scholarly intentions of his student, Michie:

As always, his manner seemed to be concealing something, though Dixon could never be sure what. (3.3)

He's especially cynical about pretentious types, who try to be who they're not. He saves his worst comments for Bertrand Welch, the Professor's son, who claims to be an artist and pacifist:

The baying quality of his voice, especially in the final query, together with a blurring of certain consonants, made Dixon want to call attention to its defects; also, perhaps to the peculiarity of his eyes. This might make Bertrand assail him: splendid […]. (4.32)

To his credit, Jim doesn't spare himself one bit. He's equally cynical about his own work:

It was a perfect title, in that it crystallized the article's niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-inducing facts, the pseudo-light it threw on non-problems. (1.47)

Dixon felt, on the contrary, he had a good idea of what his article was worth from several points of view. From one of these, the thing's worth could be expressed in one short hyphenated indecency […]. (1.50)

The Shirker

In love and work, Jim has a tendency to be really avoidant. He may think of himself as a bit of a rebel surrounded by people who don't appreciate him, but he's actually lived a very passive life. He's awkward around women, and took the path of least resistance when choosing a career. In Chapter Three, he outright admits that the only reason he got into medieval history was because "the medieval papers were a soft option" (3.45) in college. He wouldn't be the first person in the world to take easy classes just to get by, but can he then turn around and complain about how meaningless his specialty is? He sure can.

He's a total doormat when it comes to Professor Welch, whom he would prefer to punch most of the time. He constantly has to swallow his real feelings about the man.

Welch was again talking about his concert. How had he become Professor of History, even at a place like this? […] As usual, Dixon shelved the question, telling himself that what mattered was that this man had decisive power over his future, at any rate until the next four or five weeks were up. (1.9)

And he spends as little time as possible on his lectures and classes. He's the laziest teacher imaginable. It's really striking to see how seldom his students are mentioned in a book that's about a college teacher. They're just an annoyance to him unless they're good looking:

So far, Dixon's efforts on behalf of his special subject [advanced course], apart from thinking how much he hated it, had been confined to aiming to secure for it the three prettiest girls in the class […]. (3.8)

He's got to be the most unmotivated scholar ever:

These facts had been there for all to read in the Acknowledgments, but Dixon, whose policy was to read as little as possible of any given book, never bothered with these […]. (1. 52)

Jim is no more assertive when it comes to his love life. For most of the book, he feels trapped in a relationship with Margaret that's not of his own making:

"How close we seem to be tonight, James." […] "All the barriers are down at last, aren't they?" she asked.

Finding this unanswerable, Dixon gazed at her, slowly nodding his head, half expecting a round of applause from some invisible auditorium. What wouldn't he give for a fierce purging draught of fury or contempt, a really efficient worming from the sense of responsibility? (2.54-55)

We think most guys would find a way to get themselves free of this. Not Jim.

Dixon avoids even trivial responsibilities. One of the reasons he thinks he's in trouble with Welch is that, soon after he was hired, he absent-mindedly kicked a small stone while strolling around the college and it hit another faculty member on the kneecap.

He looked back once and saw the Professor of English huddled up on one leg and looking at him. As always on such occasions, he'd wanted to apologize but had found, when it came to it, that he was too frightened to. (1.52)

Amis establishes pretty early on that there's a reason Jim's so passive with Margaret and his boss:

Out there, he thought how nice it would be if he could give up his dual role of conciliator and go right away from here. Five minutes would be ample for a vituperative phone-call to Welch and a short statement of the facts of the case to Margaret. Then he'd go and pack a few clothes and get on the ten-forty to London. […] But economic necessity and the call of pity were a strong combination; topped up by fear, as they both were, they were invincible. (2.57)

Because he never really does get to "purge" his feelings of being stuck with people and situations he deplores (except for some dust-ups with Bertrand), Jim can only let loose in a few ways. The three most popular? Making faces in private, thinking vile thoughts and drinking.

The Secret Life of Jim Dixon

One of the most hilarious parts of the book is our ongoing peek into what Jim's really thinking when he seems to be nodding and smiling. We get a running commentary on his inner world. He has an assortment of "faces" that he makes when nobody's looking. Guy's got a rich fantasy life:

He no longer wanted, for example, to inscribe on the departmental timetable a short account, well tricked-out with obscenities, of his views on the Professor of History, the Department of History, medieval history, history, and Margaret, and hang it out the window for the information of passing students and lecturers, nor did he, on the whole, now intend to tie Welch up in the chair and beat him about the head and shoulders with a bottle […]. (8.41)

Jim finds lots of small private ways to let off steam when forced to be in the company of people he finds intolerable. For example, when at Welch's house looking at a jug that Welch particularly prized, 

He put a thumb on each of his temples, waggled his hands at it, rolled his eyes, mouthed jeers and imprecations. (18.21)

And then, petting one of Mrs. Welch's beloved cats,

"Scratch 'em, he whispered to it. "Pee on the carpets." (18.21)

Feeling No Pain

Drew Carey joke: "Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for that. It's called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar." (Source)

Jim's most popular strategy to avoid responsibility, romance, confrontation, anxiety, envy, or hard work is to get falling-down drunk. He can't always do that, because he's broke and can't afford it, but he finds enough ways to drink that he's wasted for a good percentage of the book. We'd be here all night giving you examples, but the guy can put the stuff away:

"How much did you have?"

"Oh, I never count them. It's a bad habit, is counting them."

"Yes, I dare say. But how many do you think it was? Roughly."

"Oooh…seven or eight, possibly."

"Beers, that is, is it?"

"Good Lord, yes. Do I look as if I can afford spirits?"

"Pints of beer?"

"Yes." (6.29-36)

Jim's drinking gets him in heaps of trouble—the incident with burning the bed sheets, the massive hangovers—but it's how he copes.

[Jim] swallowed half his new glassful in one go; it slid warmly down to join the previous three sherries and the half-dozen measures of Bill Atkinson's whiskey. In a sense, but only in a sense, he was beginning not to worry about the lecture […]. (21.15)

One of the markers of Jim's development as a character is that he eventually stops avoiding and starts acting. It takes the disastrous lecture and the loss of his job, but he eventually finds the courage to pursue Christine and strike out for London and a new career.

The Bad Boyfriend

Apart from his job, Jim's biggest failure is his romantic life. He feels like he's stuck being Margaret Peel's boyfriend, even though he's not attracted to her at all. Early in the book, we learn that:

He'd been drawn into the Margaret business by a combination of virtues he hadn't known he possessed: politeness, friendly interest, ordinary concern, a good-natured willingness to be imposed upon, a desire for unequivocal friendship. (1.17)

In other words, Jim feels bad about the fact that Margaret tried to commit suicide after her last boyfriend dumped her. Jim worries she might do something drastic again, so he plays along and hangs around. It's interesting to think that this unhealthy relationship actually brings out some of the best in Jim. He's much more outspoken with her about his feelings about his job and his colleagues, and he appreciates her practical help in figuring out how to handle social functions at the college.

While stuck in this relationship with Margaret, Jim feels a strong attraction to Christine Callaghan. At first, the attraction is pretty superficial:

In a few more seconds Dixon had noticed all he needed to notice about this girl: […] the large breasts and narrow waist, the premeditated simplicity of the wine-coloured corduroy skirt and the unornamented white linen blouse. (4.13)

It's one thing to say that he thinks she looks good; it's another to say that this is all he needs to know about her. It's still another to spell "colored" with a "u."

As time goes on, Jim seems to begin to care about who Christine is as a person. In the taxi on the way home to the Welches', he asks her to tell him about her life story and how she came to date a guy like Bertrand. But after Christine spills her guts about her conflicted feelings about Bertrand, he starts to lecture her:

"You've got a long way to go, if you don't mind me saying so, even though you are nice. [. . . ] People get themselves all steamed up about whether they're in love or not, and can't work it out, and their decisions go all to pot. They ought to realize that the love part's perfectly easy; the hard part is the working out, not about love, but about what they're going to do. The difference is that they can get their brains going on that, instead of taking the sound of the word "love" as a signal for switching them off." (14.116)

We're going to take a chance here and suggest that Jim's rather condescending lecture to Christine in the cab seems to be a turning point in his quest to feel more in control of his life. He certainly felt in control of Christine at that moment. She has no answer to his criticisms except to snuggle up to him and go to sleep. He surprises himself: a guy who has very little experience with women manages to come out with some strong ideas about love and relationships. And she seems to buy it.

More than ever he felt secure: here, he was, quite able to fulfill his role, and, as with other roles, the longer you played it the better chance you had of playing it again. Doing what you wanted to do was the only training, and the only preliminary, needed for doing more of what you wanted to do. Next time he saw Michie he'd be much less respectful to him; next time he saw Atkinson he'd talk to him more; he'd get some sense out of that Caton fellow about his article. (14.130)

After this episode, Jim feels empowered for the first time in the book. We take a look in our "Theme: Women and Femininity" section about what this says about Jim's attitude towards women. As much as we love our roguish Jim, we'd watch out if we were Christine.