JOSEPH CONRAD: THE AUTHOR AND HIS TIMES

No one could have expected Joseph Conrad to become one of the

great English novelists. His driving ambition as a youth was to
be not a writer but a sailor; on top of that, he wasn't English.
Incredibly, English was his third language, and he didn't learn
it until he was past 20.

The novelist, whose real name was Jozef Teodor Konrad

Korzeniowski, was born on December 3, 1857, at Berdichev, a city
in Polish Russia that now belongs to the Soviet Union. Both his
parents were committed revolutionaries in the Poles' struggle
for independence from Russia. His father's subversive
activities led to his arrest in 1861 and the family's exile to
the remote Russian city of Vologda. Traveling there,
four-year-old Jozef was stricken with pneumonia. Illness dogged
his childhood, and as an adult he suffered from recurrent bouts
of ill health.

Life was hard in Vologda--too hard for Conrad's mother. The

family eventually received permission to move to a less severe
climate, but she died of tuberculosis when her son was only
seven years old. Conrad's father was broken in health and in
spirit. Once an original poet, he turned to translating to make
a living; Conrad's first contact with the English language
occurred when he observed his father translating Shakespeare.
Although the father was finally allowed to return to the Polish
city of Cracow, he died after a year there, in 1869, when Conrad
was eleven.

Conrad's maternal grandmother took over the job of bringing him

up, and a stern but devoted uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski, oversaw
his education. Conrad wasn't an easy charge. He was a less
than spectacular student. (His talent for languages didn't
become apparent till much later. At this stage, even his Polish
needed work.) To make matters worse, the boy decided when he was
14 that he wanted to become a sailor--an unusual ambition in
landlocked Poland. His uncle sent him on the Grand Tour of
Europe with a tutor who was supposed to bring him to his senses.
It didn't work. The tutor ended up pronouncing Conrad a
"hopeless Don Quixote," and in 1874 the 16-year-old youth
journeyed to the French port of Marseilles to learn the ropes as
a sailor. Many readers have found echoes of Conrad's youthful
idealism and romantic outlook in Lord Jim.

Conrad's four years in the French merchant marine included

voyages to the West Indies and, possibly, the Venezuelan coast,
as well as a gun-running adventure in Spain. He took advantage
of Marseilles' cultural life, but the city's social life proved
a little too intense for the young man to handle. Ultimately he
found himself desperately in debt, and one evening he invited a
creditor to tea and shot himself before the man arrived. In
early 1878 an urgent telegram reached Bobrowski saying his
nephew was wounded and needed money. Bobrowski went to
Marseilles and was relieved to find his nephew's health, if not
his pocketbook, in reasonably good shape. Young Conrad was
handsome, robust, and well-mannered, and he had become an
accomplished, though impoverished, sailor. (The author would
later romanticize the bullet mark on his left breast into a
dueling scar.)

Since Conrad could no longer remain in the French merchant

marine without becoming a French citizen--entailing the peril of
conscription into the French military--later in 1878 he signed
on an English freighter. He served with the British merchant
marine for the next 16 years, becoming a British subject in
1886. Conrad sailed to Asia and the South Pacific, where he
collected the raw material for novels that--amazingly--he still
had no ambition of writing. However, his irritable and gloomy
disposition didn't work to his advantage. He had quarrels with
at least three of his captains, and periods of poor health and
terrible depression continued to immobilize him.

During the 1880s, Conrad made voyages to such Asian ports as

Singapore, Bangkok, and Samarang (on Java). All three have
their place in Lord Jim: Singapore as the unnamed city where
the Patna inquiry is held; Bangkok as one of the ports where Jim
works as a water-clerk (and gets into a fight); and Samarang as
another of these ports, and the home of Marlow's friend Stein.
On one of his voyages, Conrad was injured during a storm, much
as Jim is in Chapter Two, and was laid up in the same Singapore
hospital where Jim recuperates. After his recovery, he signed
up as mate on the steamship Vidar, which traveled around the
islands of the Malay Archipelago. It was in these exotic
islands that Conrad found the raw material for his first two
novels, Almayer's Folly and An Outcast of the Islands. He
transformed one Borneo locale into the fictional Patusan, where
the last half of Lord Jim is set.

By 1888 he had risen to the rank of captain, and he received his

first command on a small ship sailing out of Bangkok. On his
return to England, he was unable to find another command, and so
through the influence of relatives in Brussels he secured an
appointment as captain of a steamship on the Congo River. But
once he reached Africa, Conrad fell prey to fever and dysentery
that left his health broken for the rest of his life. Though
his experiences there were to form the basis of his most famous
tale, Heart of Darkness, he returned to England traumatized.
His outlook, already gloomy, became even blacker.

Captain Korzeniowski (as Conrad was still known) didn't realize

it, but he was approaching the end of his sea career. In 1889
he had begun a novel based on his voyages to Asia. He continued
work on it in Africa and afterward, and in 1895 the book
appeared as Almayer's Folly by Joseph Conrad. (After putting up
for years with British garblings of "Korzeniowski" he decided to
put something they could pronounce on the title page.) Like most
of the books he wrote for the next 20 years, the novel was a
success with the critics but not the public. It was dedicated
to the memory of his uncle Bobrowski, who had died in 1894.

Writing was difficult, even painful, for Conrad. He was

agonizingly slow, though financial pressures drove him to work
faster than he liked. Consequently, he was almost always
dissatisfied with the finished product. (He called Lord Jim,
the novel that many regard as his masterpiece, "too wretched for
words" and lamented, "How bad oh! HOW BAD!") His already wobbly
finances became even shakier after his marriage, in 1896, and
the birth of two sons, in 1898 and 1906. There were periods of
remarkable productiveness (he completed Heart of Darkness in
less than two months), but these alternated with periods of
despair in which he could write nothing; in addition, he had
recurrent bouts of nervous exhaustion and gout to contend with.
Conrad once described his father in words that could have well
described himself: "A man of great sensibilities; of exalted
and dreamy temperament, with a terrible gift of irony and of
gloomy disposition."

Although his income from his books remained low, Conrad's

reputation grew steadily higher. He was a "writer's writer"
whose friends and admirers included such famous authors as Ford
Madox Ford, Stephen Crane, John Galsworthy, W. H. Hudson, H.
G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, and his idol, Henry James. His
well-received books included Typhoon (1902), Nostromo (1904),
and The Secret Agent (1907). After 1910 he finally became
financially secure. In that year, he was awarded a small
pension. He was able to begin selling his manuscripts to an
American collector. In 1911, Conrad published Under Western
Eyes. And he finally attained best-sellerdom with his novel
Chance, serialized in 1912 in the New York Herald and published
in book form two years later in Great Britain and America.
Victory followed in 1915. In 1923 Conrad enjoyed an
enthusiastic reception during a visit to the United States. He
was dogged by serious illness by this time, however, and died on
August 3, 1924, in England.

Conrad's work was crucial to the development of the modern

novel. In his use of the limited point of view--that is,
presenting a tale through a single consciousness (in the case of
Lord Jim, through Marlow)--he was the literary heir of Henry
James, the novelist he admired above all others. But Conrad
took the device farther than James had, limiting the point of
view so strictly to one character (and removing the impersonal
"narrator") that he paved the way for such 20th-century writers
as James Joyce and William Faulkner, who delved directly into
their characters' minds through the device known as interior
monologue. Conrad's use of fractured chronology--that is,
narrating events out of their time-sequence, a later one before
an earlier one--became a major technique in 20th-century
fiction. (See this Guide's section on Form and Structure.) His
early novels, especially Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, are
more experimental in this direction than his later ones. In
addition to Conrad's influence on the style and technique of
fiction writers, the profundity--and bleakness--of his vision
have shaped the outlook of many writers.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: THE PLOT

Jim is a young man with a vivid, romantic imagination, who

decides to become a sailor after reading sea stories. He loves
picturing himself as a hero, but he misses his chance when it
comes. As a student on a training ship, he hangs back from a
rescue mission during a storm because the storm frightens him
so.

Later, Jim signs on as first mate of the Patna, a rusty old ship
that's been hired to take 800 Muslims on a pilgrimage. One calm
night the ship is damaged at sea, and the other white members of
the crew--the obese German captain and the three
engineers--decide to flee in one of the lifeboats. Jim is
horrified: They're responsible for 800 other lives. But
considering the damage, the Patna seems certain to sink any
moment. At the last minute, Jim leaps overboard and into the
escaping lifeboat.

The five men are soon rescued, and they report the sinking of
the Patna. But later it turns out that the Patna hasn't sunk:
A French gunboat discovered it and towed it into port. Jim and
his mates look like cowards to the rest of the world. An
inquiry is held, though Jim is the only one of the runaways who
actually attends. The German captain has fled; the first and
second engineers are hospitalized; the third engineer died
during the escape. At the end, the court revokes Jim's license
to serve as a ship's officer.

During the course of the inquiry Jim meets Captain Marlow, who's
twenty years his senior. Marlow becomes interested in Jim's
story and invites Jim back to his hotel; Jim, relieved to have a
sympathetic ear, supplies all the painful details. Though
there's no excusing Jim, it's also clear that he's not as great
a scoundrel as the other crew members. Marlow develops some
compassion for the young man. (It's Marlow who narrates most of
the novel.)

One of the judges at the inquiry is a highly successful and

extremely conceited captain named Montague Brierly. The inquiry
disturbs him, and he tries to talk Marlow into bribing Jim to
run away. Brierly is so anguished by the potential for human
cowardice that Jim has demonstrated that he kills himself at sea
a short time later.

After the inquiry, Marlow comes to Jim's aid by recommending him

to a friend who owns a rice mill. Jim does well there, but when
the second engineer of the Patna shows up looking for work, Jim
leaves. He can't stand being reminded of his humiliation. For
the next several years he drifts from port to port, working as a
water clerk for suppliers of provisions to ships. As soon as
he's recognized, he leaves. But eventually he becomes so
well-known that there's almost no place left for him to hide.

At this point Marlow seeks advice and help from his old friend
Stein, a wealthy German merchant whose chief interest is
collecting butterflies and beetles. Stein hires Jim as a trade
representative in the remote district of Patusan. The district
is tyrannized by its ruler, the Rajah Allang. The Rajah's main
rival is old Doramin, who leads a settlement of Muslim
immigrants and is, incidentally, an old friend of Stein's. A
third political force is Sherif Ali, a cult leader who has
terrorized the countryside.

The Rajah takes Jim prisoner as soon as he arrives. But Jim

escapes and seeks out Doramin, who protects him for the sake of
his old friendship with Stein. Jim hatches a plot to rout
Sherif Ali, and with the help of Doramin's son, Dain Waris, they
drive him out of Patusan. Jim rises to a position of leadership
in the community, and the Rajah's power is curbed.

But the person who hates Jim most isn't the Rajah but Cornelius,
the man Jim replaced as Stein's representative. Cornelius' dead
wife bore a daughter by another man, and Jim falls in love with
this daughter. He calls her Jewel. Jewel loves Jim fiercely,
but she's terrified he'll abandon her as her father abandoned
her mother.

Under Jim's leadership, life for the villagers becomes stable

and secure. But that changes when a malicious British pirate
named Gentleman Brown invades Patusan, bent on plunder. Jim is
away when Brown's men sail up the river, but Dain Waris leads
the defense, cornering Brown and his men on a hill. When Jim
gets back, he negotiates with Brown, who agrees to leave
quietly. Jim's decision to let him go without a fight is
controversial, but Jim thinks it's best to avoid bloodshed.

But Brown wants revenge, and Cornelius is ready to help him. He

knows that Dain Waris is camped downstream with a group of men
who are guarding the river, and he leads Brown and his men up
behind the camp, where they stage a sneak attack. Dain Waris
and a number of others are killed. Jim's servant, Tamb' Itam,
witnesses the massacre, and he manages to kill Cornelius before
speeding to the village with the terrible news.

Jim and Jewel know that Doramin is going to want revenge for the
death of his son. Jewel begs Jim to either put up a fight or
escape with her; but Jim refuses. Proving once and for all
that, no matter what happened on the Patna, he's not afraid of
death, he goes to face Doramin. The angry old man shoots him
through the chest, and Jim falls dead.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: JIM

Conrad's title character is a complex intellectual puzzle, and

it is very difficult to judge him. In deserting 800 pilgrims
aboard the Patna, Jim commits an action that's utterly
inexcusable. But Conrad provides facts that soften the crime in
every possible way. Jim genuinely believes that the ship is
about to sink, and that he can't do anybody any good by staying
aboard. Besides, his escape owes far more to an impulse--an
inexplicable impulse--than to any conscious decision. Moreover,
Jim has so many admirable qualities (which he demonstrates amply
in the second half of the novel) that it seems unfair to
remember him as the man who jumped off the Patna. And yet
that's how people do remember Jim--even his friend and champion
Marlow and, from what Marlow can gather, Jim himself.

According to Marlow, Jim is finally "not clear" to him. So it's

no wonder that the readers have reached no consensus about Jim,
either. The second half of the novel remains particularly
controversial. Some readers believe that Jim's accomplishments
in Patusan make up for his cowardice aboard the Patna. Others
are equally certain that his final blunder of judgment, a
blunder that costs many lives, is intimately linked with his
behavior on the Patna. (A deeper question arises: Is there a
scale on which you can balance a person's good acts against his
bad acts?)

Considering this moral ambiguity surrounding Jim, it's fitting

that the image he's most often associated with is mist. Marlow
complains that he can never get a clear picture of him, because
Jim always appears, metaphorically speaking, in a fog or mist.
Occasionally the mist parts, allowing Marlow (and the reader) a
deeper glimpse into Jim's inner workings. But the mist always
closes again. This image undergoes a metamorphosis in the last
part of the novel, where Jim repeatedly appears "under a cloud."
"Cloud" retains the associations of "mist," suggesting that it's
difficult to see beyond the surface of Jim's actions into his
motives. But the phrase also carries its usual implication of a
damaged reputation. Jim dies "under a cloud" in that he leaves
so many people both in Patusan and in the wider world thinking
that he deserves to be condemned. But the wording also suggests
that those who condemn Jim don't see or understand him clearly.
Surely, for example, Doramin is wrong to think Jim is guilty of
any kind of treachery toward Dain Waris.

Jim is the victim of his own vivid imagination. He tends to

freeze in difficult situations because he's so adept at
picturing the worst possible outcomes. He's also a romantic
idealist--that is, he thinks perfection is really within his
grasp, and so he's doubly hard on himself when he fails to be
perfect. He may not live up to his vision of himself, but he's
no hypocrite, either--he strives to live up to it. He's naive,
even immature, to have so little perspective on his ideals. But
if he's naive he's also admirable. After all, he does manage to
impose his vision of order and justice, at least for a while, on
troubled Patusan.

Jim's naive idealism isn't his only boyish trait. He has a

youthful exuberance that borders on impulsiveness, and doesn't
always serve him well. His response to an insult is either to
blush or to fight. And he occasionally stammers like a
tongue-tied boy. Marlow frequently notes this inarticulate
quality but admits that it doesn't keep Jim from being
"wonderfully expressive." He has a sulky side, which comes to
the fore when he's criticized, combined with a stiff-upper-lip
British pride that makes him want to hide his feelings. Thus,
in Chapter Six he tries to pick a fight after he hears someone
call a dog "that wretched cur" and mistakes the words for an
insult directed at him. But what humiliates him most deeply is
having his wounds exposed: Until then he had faced his loss of
reputation with a public air of indifference that was a long way
from his true feelings.

Jim's judgment may (or may not) be unsound, but he does at least
prove by the end of the novel that he's not afraid of death. He
arrives in Patusan, knowing the danger, with an unloaded gun.
He leads the assault on Sherif Ali at great risk to his own
life. He regularly demonstrates his fearlessness by drinking
the Rajah's coffee, which he has good reason to believe may be
poisoned. And finally he goes to confront Doramin knowing that
he will almost certainly die. Whatever Jim's faults, he rebuts
the charge of cowardice in the face of death.

Those faults may have to do with his egoism, a characteristic to

which Marlow refers again and again. Jim is ultimately obsessed
with himself, his image of himself and his own behavior. He
isn't very concerned with the rest of the world (which is not to
say he's selfish). His good deeds in Patusan satisfy a test
he's set for himself--fine as he is, he doesn't go there out of
charity. He takes great satisfaction in being loved and trusted
and revered, and in knowing that nobody in Patusan would call
him a coward. But in the end he places his own ideals, and his
own needs, far above Jewel's or the community's--whose interests
aren't served by his death. Jewel is left widowed and alone;
the community loses a leader who's brought peace and curbed the
tyranny of the Rajah. In fact, the only interest served is an
abstract one: Jim's egoism, his personal ideal of bravery, at
the cost of his own life.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: MARLOW

Although Marlow, the ship's captain who tells most of Jim's

story, plays only a small part in the action of Lord Jim, he's
as important to the novel as the title character. Almost
everything that happens is filtered through Marlow's
consciousness via his narration. As a thinker, Jim is rather
dull. His ideas are simple and boy-scout naive. What gives the
novel its verve and its complexity is Marlow's wide-ranging
observation and analysis.

Marlow is a practiced observer--the very opposite of the

egoistical Jim. While Jim is obsessed with himself, it's other
people (particularly Jim) who fascinate Marlow. He complains
about the way men and women constantly seek him out to spill
their innermost thoughts, but you can see why they do: His
interest and compassion, his need to understand, make him a
natural confessor.

Conrad had already used Marlow as a narrator, in the short story

"Youth" (1898) and the short novel Heart of Darkness (1899).
But in those works Marlow was little more than a fictional
stand-in for the author; his attitudes, perceptions, judgments
were Conrad's. In fact, their only major difference was their
birthplaces--Britain for Marlow, Poland for Conrad. But in Lord
Jim the relationship has altered. Marlow is no longer simply a
stand-in, though his moral and ethical judgments still resemble
Conrad's. Now Marlow allows his affection for Jim to soften his
judgment. Deep down, he wants to find a way to excuse him.
Conrad, in contrast, presents the evidence with rigorous
objectivity. For example, in his talk with the French
lieutenant (Chapters Twelve and Thirteen), Marlow wants to think
that the lieutenant's sympathy and understanding of human fear
will lead to his pardoning Jim. Conrad lets Marlow build this
house of cards out of his hopes--then has the lieutenant topple
it with a few words about a topic Marlow has been avoiding:
honor.

Jim's emotions are essentially simple because he views the world

in simple, even naive terms. Marlow, on the other hand, is
endlessly complex in his responses to events and his analyses of
them. He's exasperated by Jim's immaturity, though he's also
drawn to the way Jim has held on to his youthful illusions. But
though Marlow may have lost his own illusions, he's anything but
a cynic. In fact, he's the opposite--a moralist. Marlow is
concerned with the essential goodness or badness of people,
their "butterfly" or "beetle" natures. (See the Note in Chapter
Twenty.) He readily condemns the Patna's captain and engineers,
or Cornelius and Brown; and he doesn't hesitate to heap praise
on characters like Stein and Dain Waris. What disturbs him
about Jim's case is the ethical problem. Marlow is an adept
enough judge of character to recognize that Jim is a far cry
from the scoundrel he would have expected in a first mate who
deserted his ship. In fact, his confidence in Jim goes so far
that he's willing to make himself "unreservedly responsible" for
Jim's behavior by recommending him for employment in terms you
would use only for a close friend. So Marlow faces the moral
puzzle: how could a genuinely good man behave like a very bad
one?

Philosopher though he is, he balks at the one answer that might

let Jim off. He's unwilling to concede that the "fixed standard
of conduct," the code of ethics by which we behave, isn't
grounded or "fixed" in any cosmic sense as, for example, the law
of gravity is fixed. He refuses to believe it's an arbitrary
standard, "fixed" only for our own convenience but dispensable
in certain situations. For Captain Marlow the good sailor, a
ship's officer doesn't abandon the passengers under any
circumstances--period. But Jim seems no more villainous,
really, for his action. This moral puzzle is part of what draws
Marlow to Jim. In addition, of course, he likes him. And he
feels a certain responsibility, recognizing that nobody will
help the young man if he doesn't, and that without help Jim is
probably bound for a future of alcoholic ruin.

And yet for all his kindness Marlow is so reserved that he seems
cold. He seems to have difficulty handling affection. Whenever
Jim tries to express friendship or gratitude, Marlow dodges with
a joke or a gruff reply. He actively avoids moments of what he
calls "real and profound intimacy," preferring for such intimacy
to be understood rather than expressed. Marlow's formality
keeps the prose from turning mushy. Marlow is an admirable man,
but he doesn't like to claim his own virtues; he'd rather come
across as bad-tempered and gruff.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: THE CAPTAIN OF THE PATNA

Jim's captain, a vulgar, obese German by way of Australia, is

everything a captain shouldn't be: irresponsible, corrupt, and
contemptuous of his passengers (he calls them "cattle"). When
his ship is damaged at sea, he wastes no time trying to save the
passengers, and abandons it without a second thought. Later,
before the inquiry, he vanishes--apparently having (unlike Jim)
some place to go, some connections who will take him in. Conrad
has a good deal of fun at his expense, ridiculing his vulgarity,
his bad English, and his grotesque bulk.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: THE CHIEF ENGINEER

The chief engineer is a cohort of the captain's, and just as

corrupt. They're a team of embezzlers. Physically they look
grotesquely like Laurel and Hardy: the captain revoltingly fat,
the chief engineer bone-thin, with sunken cheeks, sunken
temples, and sunken eyes. It's the chief engineer who, once the
Patna has been deserted, has the illusion of seeing it sink.
His illusions continue back on shore, where he succumbs to
hallucinations after three days of heavy drinking. He claims to
have a clear conscience about abandoning the ship ("I could look
at sinking ships and smoke my pipe all day long"), but his
drinking suggests he's trying to forget. The toad visions seem
to be displaced guilt: His deranged mind has transformed the
abandoned pilgrims into vengeful toads. His distress suggests
that breaking the "fixed standard of conduct" carries heavier
personal consequences than Marlow first thought.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: THE SECOND ENGINEER

The second engineer is a nasty, obnoxious little man who talks

too much. He's as corrupt as the captain and the chief
engineer, but he does at least show a little spirit during the
Patna crisis by running to the engine room, at great risk and in
great pain from a broken arm, to fetch a hammer. Months after
the inquiry, he turns up destitute at Mr. Denver's rice mill,
where Jim has found work with particularly good prospects. His
offensive familiarity eventually drives Jim away. There's a
hint in his fawning that he intends to blackmail Jim.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: THE THIRD ENGINEER (GEORGE)

Poor George surfaces just long enough to die of heart failure

during the Patna crisis. He's in bed when the ship is damaged,
and the other officers rouse him. Jim notes the irony of his
death: If he had been a little braver and not exhausted his
heart trying to get off the ship, he would have survived. When
Jim leaps into the lifeboat, the other officers mistake him for
George in the darkness, not realizing that George has died.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: MONTAGUE BRIERLY

"Big Brierly" is a highly successful and conceited sea captain

who serves as one of the nautical assessors, or judges, at the
court of inquiry into the Patna incident. He seems like a man
who's enjoyed every possible stroke of good fortune. And yet he
kills himself shortly after he hears the case.

From what Marlow gathers, Brierly's suicide seems directly

related to his high opinion of himself. Brierly perceives that
few sailors ever have to confront the kind of moral test Jim has
faced (and failed) aboard the Patna. Apparently he becomes
obsessed with the anxiety that he would behave the same way.
After all, Brierly's life has consisted of one piece of luck
after another. What would happen if his luck ran out? Brierly,
it would seem, has never thought about that question, but once
he starts thinking about it he can't stop. He kills himself out
of fear of his own cowardice. He has based his opinion of
himself solely on externals--all the awards and honors and
praise he's received. He has no fundamental belief in himself,
nothing internal. When he starts questioning his worth, he has
no internal confidence with which to fight off doubts and the
doubts soon overwhelm him.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: JONES

Jones is Brierly's chief mate at the time of his suicide. He

detests Brierly so much that he can hardly stand being civil to
him. After Brierly's death, though, he develops such reverence
for his former captain that he comes close to weeping when he
talks about him. His change of heart owes much to Brierly's
having recommended him as his successor in a letter written just
before he jumped overboard. Jones doesn't get the promotion,
but by the time Marlow speaks to him, some two years later, he's
taken charge of some other "nautical wreck."

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT

More than three years after the fact, Marlow encounters an

elderly lieutenant of the French gunboat that towed the Patna to
port (Chapters Twelve and Thirteen). The lieutenant fills
Marlow in on what happened to the Patna after its officers
abandoned her. He's a model of military courage and efficiency.
The scars on his hand and his temple attest to the action he's
seen. He condemns actions on the Patna. Fear may be
understandable, but cowardice isn't defensible. The
lieutenant's highest value is honor. He would never have the
slightest doubts about the fixed standard of conduct.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHESTER

Chester is an Australian adventurer who accosts Marlow after

Jim's trial with a job offer for Jim (Chapter Fourteen). He has
a crackpot scheme for hauling guano (sea bird manure, for
fertilizer) off a waterless Pacific island, and he wants to
engage Jim as overseer for 40 coolies there. Though he derides
Jim for taking his punishment to heart so, he also knows Jim
doesn't have any other prospects. Chester prides himself on
seeing things "exactly as they are," but in fact he's a gross
cynic without the least conception of personal honor. His
cynicism is the reverse of Jim's idealism; he forms a beetle to
Jim's butterfly (see the note to Chapter Twenty). The Chester
episode demonstrates to Marlow how vulnerable Jim will be to
unscrupulous adventurers, making Marlow feel his responsibility
as Jim's only real friend. Chester does eventually set sail for
his guano island, but the whole enterprise disappears in a
hurricane at sea (Chapter Sixteen).

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: MR. DENVER

After Jim's trial, Marlow sends him to work for Mr. Denver, a
wealthy friend who owns a rice mill (Chapter Eighteen). Mr.
Denver is an elderly bachelor who's spent his life distrusting
people, but he's so charmed by Jim that Jim has a good chance of
becoming his heir. When the obnoxious second engineer of the
Patna turns up, Jim runs away, leaving Mr. Denver wounded and
bitter.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: STEIN

Stein was born in Germany, as his thick accent and mangled

syntax attest. He is a wealthy merchant operating out of Java.
As a young man, he was a partisan in the region's bitter power
struggles, and his exceptional courage led him through one
adventure after another. He married, but both his wife and
daughter are long dead. The old man's main interest now is his
remarkable collection of butterflies and beetles--Conrad's
symbols for the two poles of human nature. You will hear more
about these later.

Stein's appearance in Chapter Nineteen heralds a shift in the

basic assumptions of the novel. The early chapters are grimly
realistic, with heavy emphasis on the futility of illusions. In
the first half, Jim's idealism is viewed as commendable,
perhaps, but obviously impractical and even dishonest in the
distance between Jim's fantasies of himself and his behavior on
the Patna. Stein expresses this point of view even as he
contradicts it. He explains that the distance between your
dreams and accomplishments is necessarily a source of pain. But
all the same, he advises, "In the destructive element
immerse"--that is, keep following your dreams even though you
can't attain them.

The reason Stein partly undercuts his own advice is that he

seems to have attained all his own dreams. Of course, as he
explains to Marlow, a casual observer can't see his failures,
his lost dreams. Still, he seems like exactly the kind of
romantic dreamer that Jim was criticized for being--and exactly
the kind of man Jim would like to be.

Stein plays a small part in the plot of the novel, sending Jim
to Patusan as his trade representative. But his position in the
center of the book lends great weight to his words. In fact,
the novel ends with Stein and his butterflies.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: MOHAMMED BONSO

Mohammed Bonso is Stein's princely ally in the regional power

struggles, assassinated when peace was at hand. Stein married
his sister, "the princess." Both she and their small daughter,
Emma, later died of an infectious fever (Chapter Twenty).

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: RAJAH ALLANG (TUNKU ALLANG)

The nominal ruler of Patusan is the retarded Sultan (Chapter

Twenty-two), but the real power is his corrupt old uncle, the
Rajah Allang. The rajah is a dirty, wrinkled opium addict, and
he's a tyrant. Any peasant who violates his trade monopoly by
doing commerce with someone else faces a death sentence. The
rajah takes Jim prisoner when he first arrives in Patusan.
Later, after Jim has risen to power, the rajah can't afford to
kill him (though he'd like to) because Jim protects him from the
wrath of Doramin's followers, who would very much like his head.
Jim regularly demonstrates his fearlessness by accepting the
rajah's coffee, which he has good reason to think may be
poisoned.

When Patusan is invaded by Gentleman Brown and his small army of

pirates, the rajah, through his representative Kassim, carries
on negotiations with the invaders. This cynical diplomacy comes
to nothing, but the outcome of events--the deaths of Jim and
Dain Waris--seems likely to restore the old tyrant's former
power.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: KASSIM

Kassim, the rajah's right-hand man, is a cunning diplomat who

greets Jim on his arrival in Patusan (Chapter Twenty-four) and
later negotiates in the rajah's name with Gentleman Brown. Like
the rajah, he hates Jim and Doramin.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: DORAMIN

Doramin is the leader of the Patusan Bugis, a group of some 60

Muslim families, from the neighboring island of Celebes, who
form the faction opposed to the rajah. The old man is immensely
fat, but his weight isn't comical; each pound seems to add to
his mountainlike dignity. Doramin protects Jim for the sake of
his old friendship with Stein. He is, in general, wise and
wily; but he ultimately lets his love for his son Dain Waris
overrule his good judgment. Thus, he forestalls an attack on
the invaders in Jim's absence, fearing that his son will be
harmed in the battle. Later, after Brown's men have killed Dain
Waris, Doramin takes revenge by shooting Jim. Not only is his
vengeance an irrational act, but it's a highly foolish and
irresponsible one that will bring great harm to the Bugis he
leads, since Jim is their main protection against the tyranny of
the Rajah Allang.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: DAIN WARIS

Dain Waris, Doramin's son, is a stock figure of adventure

fiction: handsome, intelligent, daring, respectful of his
parents, and so forth. Marlow sings his praises by listing the
ways in which he's "like a white man" (Chapter Twenty-six)--a
racist way of implying that Malays who aren't like white men are
inferior. Because Doramin is ambitious for his son to become
ruler of Patusan, he's not entirely comfortable with Jim's
power--especially after Marlow assures him that Jim is never
going to leave even though Jim and Dain Waris are best friends.
Dain Waris dies through the treachery of Brown and Cornelius,
but Doramin's rankling resentment leads him to avenge his son by
shooting Jim.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: SHERIF ALI

Sherif Ali, "an Arab half-breed" and religious fanatic, has

incited the tribes in the interior to rise and terrorize the
countryside. He's built a stronghold on one of the twin hills
overlooking the village. Both the rajah and Doramin are wary of
him. Jim makes his name by leading Doramin's men into Sherif
Ali's supposedly impregnable camp and driving him out of
Patusan.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: TAMB' ITAM

Jim's faithful servant, silent and dour, is another stock

character of escapist fiction. This name means "black clerk" in
Malay. Like Jim, he's an outsider (a Malay from the north) whom
the rajah took prisoner on his arrival in Patusan, and who
escaped to the Bugis. He witnesses the massacre of Dain Waris'
men, and he executes the treacherous Cornelius on the spot.
Much of Marlow's information about Jim's last days comes from
Tamb' Itam, who has escaped with Jewel to Stein's home in
Samarang.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: JEWEL

"Jewel" isn't her real name (which Marlow never discloses), but
the English translation of Jim's affectionate Malay nickname for
her. She, too, is something of a stock figure--romantic and
tragic--but with slightly more depth of character than the other
Malays. Jewel's father abandoned her mother, who then married
Cornelius. Now the mother is dead, and Cornelius has
transferred his long bitterness to poor Jewel, whom he browbeats
constantly. She leads a miserable life until Jim arrives and
falls in love with her. But she's terrified that Jim will leave
her, as her father left her mother. When, at the end, he
marches off to die, her fierce love turns into bitterness.
Essentially she goes from one false picture of Jim to another.
During his lifetime, she won't believe anything bad of him;
after his death, she won't forgive him because, she insists, he
has abandoned her.

Though Jewel is fairly helpless in her dependency first on

Cornelius, then on Jim, she's nonetheless spirited and
resourceful. She saves Jim from Sherif Ali's assassins. Later,
when Brown's men invade and Jim is away, she proves herself a
natural leader of the community. But her judicious call for
strong action against the invaders is thwarted by Doramin's
over-cautiousness.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CORNELIUS

Cornelius, a Malayan-born Portuguese, lives in Patusan as

Stein's thoroughly incompetent trade representative before Jim
is appointed to the post. He got the job only through Stein's
regard for his wife, who was pregnant by another man and needed
a refuge. Cornelius never forgives his wife, and he never
forgives her daughter, Jewel. Marlow dislikes Cornelius so much
that his descriptions are almost funny in their disgust. One
scathing adjective follows another. Cornelius even moves like
some kind of vermin, "skulking" or "slinking" or sidling." The
only thing that keeps him from being really dangerous is his
cowardice. It takes Brown to give Cornelius' malice some
teeth.

Cornelius despises Jim, presumably because Jim has replaced him.

But there's something deeper in his hatred--the natural
animosity (like Brown's) of a low creature for a superior one.
He assists Sherif Ali's plot to assassinate Jim, but doesn't get
punished for it. (Jim spares him out of deference to his
position as Jewel's "father.") He ingratiates himself with
Brown's men, he pleads with Brown to kill Jim, and he leads the
invaders to the position from which they stage their sneak
attack on Dain Waris and his men. Tamb' Itam stabs him to death
in retaliation for his part in the massacre, and so he never has
the satisfaction of seeing his treachery lead to Jim's ruin.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: THE PRIVILEGED MAN

Marlow's spoken account ends at Chapter Thirty-five. Chapters

Thirty-six through Forty-five comprise a written addendum that
Marlow sends, more than two years later, to one of his original
listeners. This "privileged man" (privileged because he's the
only member of that audience to learn the rest of Jim's story)
is never named. He seems to be elderly ("his wandering days
were over"), and the city he lives in forms a geographical
contrast to the remote village he'll be reading about. The
privileged man's outlook is racist, in that he has criticized
Jim for deserting his own culture to live among a people he
likens to brutes.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: GENTLEMAN BROWN

Gentleman Brown is called "Gentleman" because he's supposed to

be the son of a baronet, but in fact he's the lowest kind of
pirate. He has virtually no morals. His only display of
feeling is reported in a tale about his weeping over the corpse
of a woman he'd stolen from her missionary husband. Brown and
his men invade Patusan because they need food and money, and the
village looks prosperous and vulnerable on a map. But it proves
to be difficult prey. Brown's men are soon surrounded on a hill
in what looks like a hopeless position--until the rajah, via
Kassim, opens negotiations. It's then that he hears about Jim.
Brown is such a low creature that he can't imagine Jim as
anything other than a plunderer like himself. But when they
meet, and he perceives his error, his hatred is immediate and
absolute. Later, as the dying Brown relates his story to
Marlow, it's clear that his hatred is instinctive: it's like
the natural enmity of, say, a cobra for a mongoose. But Jim is
too innocent to feel this kind of enmity. He lets Brown escape
with his life, never dreaming that Brown could be so despicable
as to stage a sneak attack on innocent men--exactly what he does
as he's leaving Patusan.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: SETTING

Most of the action of Lord Jim takes place in and around

Singapore and the Malay Archipelago, a chain of islands
extending from southeast Asia to just north of Australia,
including Indonesia and the Philippines. Conrad was familiar
with the area from three visits he had made, during his sailing
years, between 1883 and 1888.

Marlow never names the city in which the Patna inquiry is held,
but his description of the harbor office, the hospital, the
hotel, and so on--suggest that it's Singapore. The city is a
port situated on the small island of Singapore, off the southern
tip of the Malay Peninsula. In Conrad's day Singapore had
already long been under British rule. (It became independent in
1959.)

For a stretch midway through the novel, Jim works as a

water-carrier in various ports, notably Bangkok, Siam
(present-day Thailand) and Samarang, Java (present-day
Indonesia), which is where Stein lives as well. After that, the
action shifts to the fictional district of Patusan. Conrad
appears to have based Jim's refuge on a settlement on the Berau
River, on the island of Borneo (mostly part of present-day
Indonesia) that he had visited himself. Although Conrad spent
only a brief time there, the locale proved to be a fertile
starting point for his imagination; he had used a similar
setting for his earlier novels Almayer's Folly (1895) and An
Outcast of the Islands (1896). But since he was only loosely
acquainted with the settlement, he probably supplemented his
knowledge with various books about the area.

The shift from a bustling port city to a remote island village

signals a shift in the novel as well. After Jim arrives in
Patusan, the fantasy element grows stronger. The novel becomes
much more like escapist fiction, with less emphasis on the
troubling moral questions that dominate the first half. Remote
villages are much more the stuff of romance than cities are.
The shift to such a picturesque setting probably has much to do
with the change in tone, especially since the protagonist, Jim,
is so given to fantasies to start with.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: THEMES
The following are major themes of Lord Jim.

1. THE FIXED STANDARD

Twenty years before Lord Jim, Dostoyevsky suggested in his

masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov, that if there is no God,
then everything is permitted. The agnostic Conrad doesn't
mention God, but the great underlying theme of Lord Jim is
related to this dictum. Does a "fixed standard of conduct"
exist--or is everything permitted? The behavior of the Patna
officers, and the fact that at least some of them escape
punishment, lead Marlow to wonder whether the standard of
conduct isn't really artificial, "fixed" for our own convenience
but without any basis in truth. Jim's case disturbs Marlow even
more deeply, because it raises the question, are there
circumstances under which the fixed standard may be violated?
If there are, then the standard isn't "fixed" at all, but
movable. If it's movable, then what kind of truth could it rest
on? Are these questions answered in Lord Jim?

2. A SECOND CHANCE

After you have violated the standard of conduct, what kind of

second chance can you expect? Many readers put this question in
terms of salvation or redemption. Some argue that no matter
what kind of glory Jim attains in Patusan, he isn't redeemed.
Others say he does achieve salvation. Still others claim that
these terms are all wrong for Lord Jim because Conrad isn't the
kind of religious writer for whom they would have any meaning:
Jim may not be "redeemed," but he's certainly rehabilitated.
The only person who seems unable to forgive Jim is Jim--the
Patna scandal keeps gnawing at his memory. Several times Conrad
pictures Jim's second chance as a "veiled opportunity," an image
that culminates in opportunity removing its veil at Jim's death.
If in fact Jim's second chance comes only when he looks death in
the face and doesn't turn away, proving once and for all he's
not a coward, but at the cost of his life--if that's Conrad's
meaning (but it's a big "if")--then the ending is very bleak
indeed.

3. ILLUSIONS AND DREAMS

Jim is so hard on himself after the Patna disgrace because he's

spent much of his life fantasizing about being a hero. Marlow
criticizes this aspect of Jim in the first half of the novel.
Jim's illusions seem useless and, in view of his cowardice, even
hypocritical. But at the same time Marlow is drawn to Jim's
naive ideals, because they remind him of his own youthful
dreams. With Stein's pronouncements in Chapter Twenty, Jim's
ideals become a much more positive character trait. You may not
be able to accomplish all your dreams, Stein advises, but you
should keep following them all the same. Jim's stupendous
success in Patusan seems to justify Stein's words. Is there a
difference between ideals and illusions?

4. BUTTERFLIES AND BEETLES

Stein is a naturalist who collects butterflies and beetles, and

these two insect types crystallize another theme, the two poles
of human nature. Jim may be fascinating because his behavior is
ambiguous (more so in the first half than in the second), but
the other characters fall pretty clearly into two groups. The
butterflies are the idealists, the romantic dreamers, the people
who aren't corrupted by the dirt that surrounds them. The
beetles are the cynics, like Chester and Brown, and the cowards,
like Cornelius and Jim's fellow Patna officers. Whatever
Marlow's doubts about the fixed standard, he's confident enough
that morality is based on some kind of truth that he isn't
afraid to pass judgment on the behavior of others. Are his
judgments accurate?

5. FRIENDSHIP

Friendship is a subtle theme that runs like a thread through the

novel. Marlow immediately feels his kinship with Jim, and keeps
referring to him as "one of us" (see the note to Chapter Five).
He also sees in Jim a reflection of his younger, more naive
self. Marlow doesn't sermonize about the rewards of friendship.
But he goes out of his way to help Jim, and he expends a lot of
energy thinking and talking about him. Because Marlow tends to
be unsentimental, even gruff, and because his affection for Jim
is sometimes obscured by the relationship of narrator to
subject, this theme stays a little below the surface. It's
still the novel's basic plot mechanism. Without the friendship,
there wouldn't be a novel.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: STYLE

Conrad wrote in a famous statement that his task as an artist

was "by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make
you feel--it is, before all, to make you see." To achieve this
goal, he fills his pages with one image after another. Conrad's
prose is rich, complicated, and sensual. It frequently verges
on excess. His reputation as an "impressionist" novelist stems
from his dependence on sense impressions to create his images
and make his points. Such a dependency is fitting for an
agnostic novelist: someone who doubts that there are general
truths you can depend on--who isn't sure whether there's a God
or not--will be likely to rely on what he can perceive directly
with his senses rather than on abstract ideas.

Conrad employs a wide-ranging vocabulary, much of it drawn from

sea life or from the exotic eastern regions that form the
setting of the novel. A big vocabulary is typical of Victorian
novelists, but Conrad doubtless took special pride in his
command of English, since it wasn't his first language. By the
time he was writing Lord Jim, he had achieved such fluency that
he could enjoy playing with the language--as he does, for
example, in the various non-English accents (like Stein's) that
find their way into the book, or in the public-school slang
("bally" this and "bally" that) that Jim is prone to use.

It would be exhausting to attempt to point out every noteworthy

image. Many of the images--for example, the moon over
Patusan--have a deeper symbolic significance. But much of the
pleasure you'll get out of Lord Jim will come simply from the
hundreds of lovely or strange or shocking word pictures, and you
should keep yourself open to this remarkable beauty as you
read.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: POINT OF VIEW

The first four chapters of Lord Jim are written in the voice of
an omniscient narrator--that is, a narrator who has the ability
to pry into a character's thoughts, in this case, Jim's. Conrad
thus lets you get to know Jim quickly, and what soon becomes
obvious is that Jim is a dreamer whose heroic fantasies are a
long way from reality.

With Chapter Five, Marlow takes over the narrative; from that
point on, you're allowed to know only as much about Jim as
Marlow knows. But aside from the fact that you no longer get to
listen in on Jim's thoughts, this shift in point of view isn't
as significant as you might expect. The main advantage the
impersonal narrator gets from his omniscience is a thorough
knowledge of Jim's fantasies--something Marlow understands after
speaking with Jim for only a few hours. This omniscient
narrator doesn't enjoy certain other advantages that the typical
omniscient narrator has at hand. For example, when the Patna
strikes whatever it is she strikes at sea, he doesn't fill you
in by saying, "It was an old shipwreck." This surmise, in fact,
comes later, from Marlow, and it's only a guess.

Conrad is a "skeptical" novelist, skeptical about the kinds of

information that are available to human beings. Just as Conrad
the agnostic doubts the existence of general certainties, Conrad
the novelist believes that what a narrator (or anybody) can know
is what he can see, hear, taste, touch, and smell--and deduce
from that evidence. So he limits the novel to Marlow's point of
view. (The narrator of the first four chapters resembles Marlow
in every aspect but his omniscience.) Marlow could be Conrad's
double as far as general character traits and outlook go, so
using him allows Conrad to speak, more or less, in his own voice
(but without the Polish accent).

However, limiting Jim's story to Marlow's point of view requires

some structural gymnastics on Conrad's part, since Marlow has to
have contact with everybody who has important information about
Jim. When Jim is leaving one job after another, Marlow has to
trail around getting his employers' side of the story. For
Marlow to relate in full the events leading to Jim's death,
Conrad has to arrange an interview between him and Gentleman
Brown. This interview, with Brown on his deathbed, is vividly
described, but it's one of the less convincing sections of the
novel.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: FORM AND STRUCTURE

Instead of narrating events in a strict time sequence, Marlow

jumps back and forth among the events of Jim's life, as well as
events in his own life (like meeting the French lieutenant) that
have a bearing on Jim. Consider, for example, the events in
Chapters Twenty-six through Twenty-eight. This is how they
occur chronologically:

1. Jim and Jewel fall in love.

2. Jim leads the assault on Sherif Ali.

3. Marlow, approaching Patusan, hears a rumor about Jim owning

a precious Jewel.

4. Marlow, visiting Patusan, talks with Jim (a) and Doramin

(b).

But these four events are described in this order:

2-4a-2-4b-1-3. This fracturing of chronology was one of
Conrad's most important contributions to the development of the
novel, though he didn't take it as far as later writers such as
William Faulkner. In fact, the novel overall has a conventional
chronological structure, beginning with Jim's early days and
moving on from the Patna incident to Jim's stint as a water
clerk in various ports, then to his eventual success in Patusan
and, finally, to his death. This overall chronology stays
intact, even though within chapters, or groups of chapters, the
time sequence is radically rearranged.

Structurally, the novel breaks into two parts that might be

called "Patna" and "Patusan," with Chapters Eighteen through
Twenty forming a rough transitional link. Conrad admitted that
the halving was a "plague spot" in the novel. There's nothing
inherently wrong with a two-part structure. But many have
argued that the Patna and Patusan episodes of Lord Jim are so
different in tone and in their basic assumptions about dreams
and heroics that they make it difficult to see the novel as a
unified whole. Do you agree?

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER ONE

Lord Jim opens almost exactly midway through the plot, with Jim
holding a series of jobs working for ship-chandlers (suppliers
of provisions to ships) in various Eastern ports. The first
half of the novel will bring you up to this point in Jim's life.
The second will take you beyond it. Your first view of Jim is
mysterious, and rather tantalizing. He works incognito, you
learn, in order to hide some disturbing fact, but you don't
learn what the fact is only that when it makes itself known, Jim
will drop everything and take off for another port. The author,
Joseph Conrad, is playing with your curiosity; it will be
several chapters before he reveals exactly what it is that Jim
is concealing. The narrator does go so far as to mention,
however, that whatever this circumstance was, it finally drove
Jim away from civilization and into a remote village, where he
became known as "Tuan Jim: as one might say--Lord Jim."

NOTE: FIRST VIEW OF JIM. In the very first paragraph, Jim

wears "immaculate" white from head to toe--a symbol that will be
used again and again in the novel. It's almost as if Jim the
idealist were purer than the soiled, earthy world around him.
Note also that in the first sentence, Jim is described as being
"an inch, perhaps two, under six feet"--just short of the
stature you might expect of a hero. Jim may not be quite the
hero he would like to be.

Translating "Tuan Jim" as "Lord Jim" has a similar twist. The

Malayan word "Tuan" is a form of respectful address that comes
closer to "Mr." than "Lord." "Lord Jim" is an inflation, a
slightly mocking exaggeration at Jim's expense.

The rest of the chapter fills you in on Jim's background. It's

significant that Jim decides to go to sea "after a course of
light holiday literature." His image of life aboard ship isn't a
realistic, mature one--it's one formed by adventure stories.
You soon learn that he likes daydreaming, and that in his
daydreams he is always a hero. Jim takes a romantic view of
himself. He's an idealist, a person whose behavior is based on
his conception of the way things should be; and he pictures
himself living up to his very highest ideals. (As you read,
you'll note that this tendency to romanticize his self-image is
an important side of Jim's personality.) But, as if to burst
Jim's romantic bubble, Conrad immediately presents a scene in
which Jim fails to live up to his high opinion of his own
courage. Jim is a student on a training ship moored in port;
during a storm, two nearby ships collide, and quick action is
called for. But Jim holds back from the rescue, paralyzed by
fear of the storm. Later he explains that he was simply caught
unawares; the incident doesn't reduce his high opinion of
himself. But it should make you wary of accepting Jim as a
typical hero. This lapse foreshadows the more serious one that
is to follow--the terrible fact that he will someday seek to
hide from his series of employers.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER TWO

Life at sea turns out to be more boring than Jim expected. He

doesn't find the heroic adventure he had dreamed about. But
he's capable, and in a short time he rises to the rank of chief
mate (second-in-command). However, he receives his promotions
"without ever having been tested." It remains to be seen whether
he'll turn out to be the hero he thinks he is. And when a week
of furious storms gives him a chance to show his mettle, an
injury lays him up and the opportunity passes.

You learn more about Jim while he's shut up in his cabin. Most
of the time he's frustrated or bored. But occasionally he's
overcome by terror of the storm. Jim's imagination makes him a
lively and intelligent man, but it also makes him have vivid
fears. He can picture the sea's anger and brutality too
powerfully for his own good. But this storm passes, too,
and--as with his momentary paralysis on the training ship--Jim
soon forgets his fear.

After a stay in a port hospital, Jim does something else

unheroic--he signs on for a job that promises to be easy. The
Patna is a creaking, corroded vessel that has been hired to
transport 800 Muslims on a pilgrimage, a journey to a holy
place. The ship's captain is a fat German who has only contempt
for the Muslims.

NOTE: The captain's first words to Jim--"Look at dese

cattle"--tell you a good deal about him. He's nasty and racist.
Conrad also lampoons the way the captain mauls English--which is
amusing, since the Polish Conrad spoke English with a pronounced
accent to the end of his days. Various characters in Lord Jim
speak with accents--German, Scottish, Irish, French. Conrad had
developed a fine ear for speech, and he obviously enjoyed
showing it off. Moreover, some of the national pride of the
naturalized Englishman shows through in this rather mean
portrait of the fat and brutal German.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER THREE

The exquisite descriptions of the nighttime sea, which open this

chapter, contain some thickly laid-on irony. These thoughts
about "everlasting safety" and "the scheme of a safe universe"
will seem like a bad joke in the ugly light of the disaster that
occurs at the chapter's end. There's even heavier irony in the
description of the sleeping pilgrims having "surrendered to the
wisdom of white men and to their courage, trusting the... iron
shell of their fire-ship." The white men, it will turn out, are
anything but wise and courageous; the rusted-out old ship is
anything but safe.

And still, Jim's daydreaming continues, so heroic and so vivid

that he's convinced he belongs to a higher order than the rest
of the crew. Indeed, they're a low-comedy group. The obnoxious
captain and his chief engineer have a reputation for peculation
(embezzling), and the second engineer is strident and obviously
drunk. (His claim of fearlessness is a degraded version of
Jim's fantasies, and it too will soon be put to the test--and
shattered.) No wonder the sensitive, intelligent Jim feels
superior.

A comic brush between the tipsy second engineer and the

irritable captain is interrupted, at the end of the chapter, by
a puzzling mishap. Notice the way that Conrad, who has often
been called an "impressionist" writer, describes the event
purely in terms of the men's sensations or impressions. Instead
of telling you the ship hit something, he restricts himself to
showing you the results: the second engineer falls down, the
captain and Jim stagger forward "by common accord," and so
forth.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER FOUR

A sudden flashforward--typical of the way time is fragmented in

Lord Jim--shifts the scene to Jim's testimony, about a month
later, at an official inquiry. The presiding officers are a
magistrate and two nautical assessors (experts who have been
appointed as assistant judges). Jim testifies that the Patna
hit something, probably the floating remains of an old
shipwreck, that knocked a hole in it. The front of the hold
(the lower part of the ship) quickly filled with water. The
only thing keeping the rest of the hold from flooding, and thus
sinking the ship, was a single rusty bulkhead (partition).

One mystery--what happened?--has given way to another--why is

Jim in hot water? Instead of clearing it up, the narrator
focuses on the inadequacy of facts--"as if facts could explain
anything!" Whether they can, or whether the facts can differ
from the truth behind an incident, is one of the questions you
will have to consider. Just as Jim is despairing that it's
useless trying to explain his actions, a new character, Marlow,
appears on the scene.

NOTE: MARLOW. Up to this point, Conrad has used an omniscient

narrator who could listen in on Jim's thoughts. From here on,
Marlow will narrate, and so the kind of information available to
you will change. You'll have to rely on what Marlow sees and
hears (fortunately, he's a keen observer) and on his
interpretation of these impressions.

Conrad had already used the crusty, philosophical sailor Marlow

as narrator in two other works, the short story "Youth" (1898)
and the short novel Heart of Darkness (1899). (Lord Jim was
originally planned as a short story, "Jim: A Sketch," to round
out a volume of the three Marlow tales.) In the earlier works,
Marlow is Conrad's alter ego--his judgments reflect the
author's. But the case in Lord Jim is more complex. There's
still a lot of Conrad in Marlow, but the author has distanced
himself somewhat. Author and character share a sympathy for
Jim, but the character is perhaps a little more eager to find
reasons to excuse him. The author marshals evidence
objectively, pro and con; he doesn't load the dice.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER FIVE

Launching before an after-dinner audience into his garrulous,

digressive monologue, Marlow steers clear of just what it was
that happened on the Patna. Instead, he describes the arrival
of the Patna officers in town. The Master Attendant (the
British officer in charge of the port) bawls out the captain.
The captain, in turn, deserts his three officers, disappearing
in a gharry, a horse-drawn cab. Jim, on Marlow's first view of
him, appears so unconcerned that Marlow would like to see him
squirm for his offense. You might think at this point that the
officers are guilty of deserting a sinking ship--which would be
almost, but not quite, correct.

Already Marlow's attitude toward Jim is complex. When he says

that trusting a ship to Jim wouldn't be safe, he comes closer
than anywhere else to condemning him outright. Jim looks "as
genuine as a new sovereign" (a gold coin), when in fact there is
some "infernal alloy" mixed in. And yet Marlow is also ready to
regard Jim's offense as the result of a weakness from which "not
one of us is safe." Here is the key to Marlow's interest in the
case. He doesn't care about the captain or the engineers, but
Jim makes an impression on him, he explains, because "he was one
of us"--a phrase he will use again and again.

NOTE: "ONE OF US." Whom does Marlow mean by "us"? The phrase
refers, on one level, to a specific group: British, white,
educated men of the sea. But it also carries a deeper, moral
meaning. Marlow describes himself as a member of a community
held together "by fidelity to a certain standard of conduct,"
and what horrifies him in the Patna incident has to do with "the
doubt of the sovereign power enthroned in a fixed standard of
conduct." The Patna officers don't even seem to care about their
offense, and their attitude calls the standard of conduct into
question. If they can break it so casually, how valuable can it
be?

In the longest anecdote in this long chapter, Marlow visits the

local hospital, where he encounters the Patna's chief engineer,
laid up with a severe case of D.T.'s (delirium
tremens--hallucinations brought on by excessive drinking of
alcoholic beverages). The engineer claims to have seen the
Patna go down, a claim Marlow dismisses (for reasons the reader
can't know yet) as a "stupid lie," though the man seems to mean
what he says. Marlow realizes that he's suffering from
hallucinations--he thinks he's surrounded by millions of vicious
pink toads.

NOTE: THE ENGINEER'S HALLUCINATIONS. The hallucinations give

form to the engineer's guilt, and you can interpret them by
applying a little amateur psychology. The sinking Patna, he
tells Marlow, was "full of reptiles." He also admits that the
officers cleared out of the ship in secret--"on the strict Q.T."
It seems likely that the 800 pilgrims, the white officers'
charges, have taken the form of giant toads in his demented
mind. The chief engineer, at least, hasn't managed to escape
the "fixed standard of conduct" without paying a tremendous
price for his offense.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER SIX

Marlow goes off on another digression, this time about Montague

Brierly, one of the two nautical assessors assisting at the
inquiry. Brierly is a young (32), successful captain, so
well-regarded that he considers himself superior to everybody.
Why, then, does he kill himself a week after the inquiry ends?

The details of the suicide come from his chief mate, Jones, whom
Marlow encounters some two years after the fact. (This
complicated device, with the primary narrator relating the words
of Marlow, and Marlow in turn repeating Jones' tale--quotation
marks within quotation marks--is typical of Lord Jim.) Jones'
story is interesting, but it provides few clues to Brierly's
behavior. More clues surface, though, when Marlow returns his
narrative to the first day of the inquiry, when he speaks at
length to Brierly. Brierly feels mortified by the questioning;
he can't imagine why Jim has remained to face the court rather
than vanish as his captain did. His agitation causes Marlow to
reconsider Jim's behavior, and he discovers, for the first time,
real courage in Jim's staying to face the court. Moreover,
since Brierly's attitude of "contemptuous boredom" on the bench
actually masks a profound anxiety, couldn't Jim's appearance of
"gloomy impudence" be a mask as well?

In any case, Brierly seems more concerned about Jim's public

humiliation than about his pangs of conscience. It becomes
clear that for him the "fixed standard of conduct" has less to
do with right and wrong than with what people think of you. It
also appears, in view of Brierly's suicide, that Jim's failure
has filled Brierly--who to all appearances is a model
seaman--with self-doubt. But if Jim has failed the test, at
least he's remained to face the consequences of his failure.
Brierly, his judge, can't even face the idea of the test, much
less the real thing. He tries to talk Marlow into bribing Jim
to clear out--not very upright behavior for an officer of the
court.

The rest of the chapter deals with Marlow's first encounter with
Jim, an awful, comic misunderstanding. On leaving the court, a
stranger points out a yellow dog and tells Marlow, "Look at that
wretched cur." Jim, hearing but not seeing, thinks they're
talking about him, bridles at the insult, and collars Marlow.
While Jim is threatening the bewildered Marlow, who has no idea
what he's so angry about, Marlow observes the young man closely
enough to see that his calm, insolent posture has been a front.
Anyone so ready to jump at an insult--an imagined insult, in
this case--must be feeling deeply humiliated. Jim, when he
finally understands his error, is so abashed at having betrayed
his facade that he practically runs away, with Marlow in
pursuit.

Marlow has been talking all along about his curiosity, but his
behavior indicates more than mere curiosity. Why, in your
opinion, is he ready to offer compassion to Jim? An invitation
to dine at Marlow's hotel initiates the friendship that will
form the core of the novel.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER SEVEN

The empty-headed diners at Marlow's hotel contrast with the

troubled, intense Jim in a way that shows him off to advantage.
As he begins his long account, Marlow warns his listeners, "I
wanted to know--and to this day I don't know." Presumably he is
referring to Jim's motivations. Or perhaps he is describing his
difficulty in judging Jim. Should you be harsh or lenient? On
the one hand, Jim is obviously making excuses, looking for ways
to escape the terrible self-knowledge that came when he failed
the test of honor. "Ah! what a chance missed!" Jim cries,
leading Marlow to observe that his romantic imagination is still
too active: Jim focuses not on the honor that he lost, but on
the glory he might have won. And Jim's excuse is the same one
he made after the storm on the training ship (Chapter One)--he
wasn't prepared. It strikes Marlow as obvious self-deception.

Yet other factors argue for leniency. One of them was already
noted by Brierly (Chapter Six): Jim may have failed the test,
but so few of us are ever tested at all that we had better
beware of judging too hastily. "Do you know what you would have
done?" Jim asks Marlow. Besides, he had good reason to leave
the Patna.

Finally you learn exactly what the Patna officers are guilty of.
Marlow remarks, "So that bulkhead held out after all." That
thin, rusty partition, the only thing keeping the ship from
being flooded, but which was certain to give way, somehow
managed to hold. The officers abandoned a sinking ship that
didn't sink. No wonder the case has become well known, and
they're so deeply disgraced.

Yet there was every reason to believe the ship would go down any
minute. Anybody would have thought so, Marlow assures his
audience. To make matters worse, there weren't enough lifeboats
for the pilgrims. Jim's overactive imagination (which, you may
recall from Chapter Two, is sometimes too vivid for his own
good) leads him to envision the scene of panic that's surely
imminent, and he's paralyzed with horror.

NOTE: THE JEDDAH INCIDENT. Conrad based the Patna disaster on

an actual case. The pilgrim ship Jeddah was abandoned at sea by
her white officers in the summer of 1880. When rescued, the
officers claimed the ship had gone down, but it was in fact
towed into port the day after they arrived. The scandal
attracted international attention. Conrad must have read the
reports in London, and he probably heard more about it three
years later in Singapore, where one of two inquiries was held.
Conrad altered various details to suit his purposes. For
example, the captain of the Jeddah was English, not German, and
he abandoned ship largely out of fear for the safety of his
wife, who was on board. The Jeddah's first mate bore some
striking resemblances, in looks and in background, to Jim; but
in convincing his captain to abandon ship, he took a more
active, more dishonorable role in the desertion than Jim does.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER EIGHT

Jim thinks of readying the lifeboats, but as he's leaving the

bulkhead one of the pilgrims grabs him and begins jabbering.
The man won't leave him alone even after Jim hits him with his
lantern. Jim maintains that he was afraid the shouts would
create a panic among the other pilgrims, but he may have struck
out of his own panic. It turns out that the man just wants some
water for his sick child.

When he reaches the bridge (above the deck), the other three
officers--captain, chief engineer, second engineer--are
preparing a lifeboat for themselves. They don't care about the
pilgrims. Jim is disgusted, and he refuses to help them. But
he doesn't do anything to help the pilgrims, either--he just
stands there, outraged but immobile. He doesn't ready the
lifeboats. He considers trying to reinforce the rotten
bulkhead, but it seems hopeless. Besides, he doesn't want to
start a panic. And what can he do alone?

But Jim isn't alone. In his paralysis, he forgets the East

Indian sailors (lascars) who make up the rest of the crew. The
two helmsmen, for example, never desert their post, even though
they know something is wrong. Marlow jumps, for a moment, to
their testimony at the inquiry. It never occurred to them to
desert their posts. Behavior like that is so inconceivable to
these honest men that they're convinced the white officers must
have abandoned ship for some good, secret reason other than
saving their skins. Their "extraordinary and damning" testimony
puts Jim doubly in the wrong--not only for deserting, but also
for not trying to avert disaster when there were other sailors
on board who could have helped him.

Throughout this chapter, Marlow's view of Jim swings between

sympathy and disgust. He suspects, rather uncomfortably, that
Jim is looking for an absolution Marlow cannot grant. But he
also admits that the issues are more complex than any court of
inquiry could handle. Jim, he complains, makes you "look at the
convention that lurks in all truth." He makes you notice
something arbitrary in the fixed standard of conduct. This is
the kind of troubling awareness that nobody wants to face,
because questioning the whole structure of morality can drive
you to despair. (Compare this with the passage about the fixed
standard in Chapter Five.) That's what Marlow's talking about
when he says that the case was "momentous enough to affect
mankind's conception of itself." There's every reason to excuse
Jim except that his behavior calls the fixed standard into
question. And without it, there's no sure right or wrong, no
sure good and evil; the structure of morality is undercut.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER NINE

As if things aren't dreadful enough, a storm now appears on the

horizon. Jim finally cuts the lifeboats loose. But then he
plants himself again, immobile, across from the spot where the
officers are bumbling with the lifeboat--"as far away as he
could get from them," he tells Marlow, which clearly isn't true.
The struggle he's watching is as slapstick as a Three Stooges
comedy, except that there are now four officers, for the third
engineer has joined them. Not for long, though--he presently
drops dead from a heart attack. (The ridiculous irony isn't
lost on Jim: If the man had been less intent on surviving, he
wouldn't have killed himself trying to escape.)

Still insisting that nobody has a right to judge him, Jim

virtually bullies Marlow into making "some fatal admission about
myself which would have had some bearing on the case"--that is,
admitting that he would have acted as Jim did. But Marlow has
more self-respect than that. He may be willing to concede that
his honor is untried, but not that it's deficient.

By now the officers have launched the lifeboat, and they're

shouting for the third engineer (who is lying dead on the
bridge) to jump. Jim's description of his final moments on
board makes him seem utterly passive. And of course he wants to
preserve this illusion, because it's a way to keep from
believing that he made the conscious, cowardly decision to jump.
He vividly recalls the sensations of that moment, but he can't
remember either deciding to jump or jumping. But he does jump,
"into an everlasting deep hole" from which he can't climb. The
deep hole is his shame. No wonder he wishes he could die.

The ultimate question for any of us to answer is what would we

have done in Jim's place. Could you say with any certainty how
you would have behaved? Why?

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER TEN

Once at sea, the four men quickly lose the Patna's lights and
assume it's sunk. The chief engineer even thinks he sees the
ship go down--a delusion he retains, you'll recall, when he's
delirious in the hospital (Chapter Five). Conrad develops at
length the imagery of darkness, quiet, void. Jim really has
leaped into an abyss of sorts. "Nothing mattered." The moral
world, the fixed standard, has vanished, and Jim is like a man
floating in a vacuum.

The storm never amounts to much--a false alarm, In the dark, the
others think that Jim is the third engineer, whose death they
don't know about. When they discover their error, they let
loose a torrent of abuse and threats. Marlow notes the element
of "burlesque meanness" in their degraded behavior. It looks,
for a moment, as if a fight will break out, and Jim grabs the
tiller, a heavy piece of wood, as a weapon. He stands with it,
alert and tense in the freezing rain, for six hours--till
sunrise. Even in Jim's disgrace, Marlow can't help admiring his
heroic endurance.

Remembering the horror of that night, Jim makes an unbelievable

attempt to blame his jump on his cowardly companions. Marlow
recognizes the absurdity of such a claim, but he consoles Jim
that he's been through a lot. "More than is fair," Jim
responds, as petulantly as a small boy--a resemblance Marlow has
already noted.

The other officers make up a story to have ready when they're

rescued. Jim won't have anything to do with them, but they feel
he won't betray them. After all, he jumped, didn't he? The
memory of their behavior upsets Jim (to the point of knocking
over a bottle of cognac) in part because he knows that his
actions, if not his intentions, were no better than theirs.

But actions aren't everything. Jim's claim that he contemplated

suicide the whole time he was in the boat is believable, for
it's becoming apparent that although he jumped, it wasn't solely
(as with his companions) out of cowardly fear for his life. Jim
is obviously a better man than that. And when Marlow assures
Jim that he's ready to believe anything Jim tells him, he isn't
being sarcastic. Jim may deceive himself, but he's too upright
to consciously deceive others. But the question remains: Why
did he jump, then? Recall Marlow's comment (Chapter Seven), "I
wanted to know--and to this day I don't know." Does Jim know
himself?

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER ELEVEN

By now Marlow has developed a somewhat fatherly feeling toward

the young man, and he reflects on "the fellowship of the craft,"
the emotions that bind an older sailor to a younger one. The
illusions that a young man carries to sea differ wildly from the
actual drudgery of life aboard ship. Jim, remember, went to sea
bolstered by his romantic imagination and the light literature
he had read. But abandoning the Patna has robbed him of many of
his illusions, especially about himself. And watching this
young man who is in many ways so admirable, Marlow feels cheated
of the last sparks of his own illusions. He's suddenly so
desolate that he now feels, as Jim did in the previous chapter,
as if he's been wandering in a void. Notice that Marlow doesn't
regard illusions as always bad. Some of Jim's illusions are
what's best in him--they're an ideal he would like to live up
to.

But Jim's complaint that there was only a thin line ("not the
thickness of a sheet of paper") between the right and the wrong
of his action exasperates Marlow. That thin line is just the
point. Right and wrong aren't usually separated by chasms. If
they were, it would be simple to choose right all the time.
Real moral courage lies in choosing right even when the
difference doesn't seem great; it's still there, and you can
still discern it.

When Marlow says that Jim "cleared out," Jim corrects him:
"Jumped." He's determined to maintain these subtle distinctions.
"Cleared out" suggests a conscious act of will, while "jumped"
merely describes an action. Jim wants to believe that he didn't
jump of his own free will, that some other power (he keeps
looking for places to lay the blame) was responsible.

He decides that suicide would be cowardly, a form of running

away. Instead he'll "wait for another chance" to prove
himself.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER TWELVE

The lifeboat is spotted by a ship just before sunset. Once

aboard, the other officers tell the story they've invented about
the sinking of the Patna. Jim doesn't contradict them--partly
because he thinks it's true in essentials, but more because
their story doesn't matter to him. What matters is the fact
that he jumped. He'll have to spend the rest of his life with
the memory of his cowardice. Whether the rest of the world
knows what he did is beside the point (he claims). In fact, he
tells Marlow that he was relieved when the truth came out.
True, he and the others were exposed as cowards. But for Jim
the humiliation is more than balanced by relief that the 800
pilgrims haven't drowned.

Marlow interrupts Jim's account now, and flashes forward to a

conversation in Sydney some years later. There he encounters a
lieutenant who happened to be aboard the French gunboat that
rescued the Patna. Conrad's portrait of this rather austere
soldier is almost comical. In remembering the Patna affair, the
lieutenant becomes emotional only once, when recalling that, for
the 30 hours he spent aboard the Patna as it was towed to port,
there was no wine to go with his meals. The memory still upsets
him. Otherwise he's a model of brusque efficiency. The scars
on his hand and his temple are convincing details; he's a
soldier who's obviously seen action.

What he tells Marlow lends some support to Jim's account. The

bulkhead, in his version, is every bit as weak as Jim described
it, and the French crew agrees that the safest thing to do is to
leave it alone. Jim's failure to reinforce it thus receives
some justification. The Patna's situation is so precarious, in
fact, that two officers are kept stationed for the whole 30
hours of the towing, to be able to cut the tow lines in case the
ship should suddenly go down.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER THIRTEEN

When Marlow tells the lieutenant what he knows about the Patna
and Jim, the lieutenant seems sympathetic enough. This
impression deepens when the lieutenant observes that nobody is
free from fear. "Man is born a coward." Courage is merely a
habit you discipline yourself into, aided by the example of
others around you. Marlow reminds him that Jim didn't have any
examples of courage (he forgets about the lascar helmsmen) and
says he's delighted at the lieutenant's lenient view.

The lieutenant immediately stiffens. Conrad describes him in

terms of metals, his hair "iron-grey," his irises resembling
"two tiny steel rings," and his efficiency like "a razor-edge on
a battle-axe." Suddenly he seems almost machinelike--all
efficiency, no compassion. He doesn't take a lenient view at
all. Fear is one thing, dishonor another--and that, he informs
Marlow coldly, he knows nothing about. (You might ask yourself
what the different characters mean by "courage" and "honor.")

This conversation took place, Marlow recalls, more than three

years after the Patna business. By that time Jim was working as
a water clerk for a certain De Jongh. (This, you'll recall, is
where you came in on Jim, in Chapter One.) The work is anything
but glamorous--a fitting way for Jim to atone for his dreams of
glory?

The notion of drudgery takes Marlow off on another

digression--this time about Bob Stanton, who once had the boring
job of selling insurance. But what Marlow wants to talk about
is Bob's death at sea, after he'd left the insurance profession.
Like Jim, he was a chief mate involved in a shipwreck. There
was time to clear out the passengers and crew, but one
hysterical lady's maid refused to leave. Rather than abandon
her, Bob drowned with her, hoping he'd be able to save her at
the last minute.

The anecdote--which is a sad bit of comedy in its own

right--reflects terribly on Jim. Bob's devotion to duty is
behavior the French lieutenant would approve of. You don't
desert a sinking ship when there are still passengers aboard, no
matter what. If you agree, can you say why?

Marlow has to admit that Jim was guilty. (As if to drum home
the point, he repeats "guilty" three times in two short
sentences.) Yet he wants to see him spared all the same. And
his reasons, he says, should be obvious by now, though he's too
delicate, or too embarrassed, to spell them out. He is talking
about friendship.

NOTE: MARLOW'S FRIENDSHIP. Marlow's interest in Jim goes far

beyond curiosity. He has a lot of his ego invested in Jim's
case, perhaps because Jim reminds him of his own lost illusions.
Thus, he's eager to find excuses for Jim. He's pleased when it
appears that the lieutenant takes a lenient view, crushed when
the lieutenant turns harsh. In telling his story, Marlow puts
up a crusty front, but isn't it becoming apparent that his view
of Jim is softer than he sometimes makes it out to be--even
though there's no denying the fact of Jim's guilt? But facts
(as in Chapter Four) aren't everything. Marlow's warm regard
for Jim isn't incidental to the plot. It's another factor for
you to consider in coming to your own final judgment of Jim.

By the end of Jim's narrative, Marlow is so sick at heart that

he repeats Brierly's offer--the bribe, if Jim would agree to run
away, that he had earlier (Chapter Six) refused to make.
There's a certain selfishness in this action, in that Marlow
wants to spare himself the pain of seeing Jim punished by the
court. That's why he grows annoyed when Jim declines the offer,
even though Jim is doing the "honorable" thing. Jim explains
his refusal in the same terms he had distinguished between
"jumped" and "cleared out" in Chapter Eleven: "I may have
jumped, but I don't run away." His willingness to remain and be
humiliated has more honor in it, at this point, than the
"irreproachable" Marlow's attempt to get rid of him. Moreover,
Jim is very aware of his dishonor--so aware that he fears (to
Marlow's amazement) that Marlow will refuse to shake hands with
him. It's an embarrassing, painful moment; but it shows Jim off
to advantage. He isn't making light of his offense.

NOTE: FRAGMENTATION OF TIME. Chapters Twelve and Thirteen

provide an excellent sample of Conrad's narrative method. The
story is like a jigsaw puzzle or a mosaic: Some pieces of
information come from Jim, some from the French lieutenant, some
directly from Marlow. Conrad's most radical departure from
traditional story-telling is in the way he fragments time.
Chapter Twelve begins by jumping between Jim and Marlow's
conversation at the hotel and the rescue of the lifeboat. Then
it moves briefly to the court of inquiry (where there is a
discussion about why the lifeboat couldn't see the Patna's
lights). Then a leap three years forward, to Marlow's encounter
with the French lieutenant. From there, three years back again,
to the towing of the Patna described from the lieutenant's point
of view. Forward again, to Marlow and the lieutenant's
conversation about fear and honor, and Jim as De Jongh's water
clerk. Then back to the unspecified time of Bob Stanton's
drowning. Then, finally, we return to Jim and Marlow's
conversation at Marlow's hotel.
This time line is very different from one in a traditional
novel, which begins, as a rule, at the beginning and ends at the
end. But Conrad doesn't really rearrange time. Despite all the
internal jumps, the story as a whole still follows traditional
chronology. Jim's sea training comes, more or less, at the
beginning of the book; the events around the Patna bring us to
the point we're at now; and the rest of the book will continue
Jim's life after the inquiry. Why do you think Conrad breaks up
the story as he does?

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Marlow describes, in some detail, the grim final day of the

inquiry, especially his own distress. Sentence is handed down:
The certificates of Jim and the captain (who's long since
vanished) are revoked, and they can no longer serve as ships'
officers.

NOTE: The punishment of the real-life Jeddah officers was less

severe. The captain had his certificate suspended for three
years; the first mate never even came to trial.

As Jim walks despondently away, Marlow's accosted by a rough

Australian by the name of Chester. Chester prides himself on
being able to "see things exactly as they are," which is another
way of saying that he's a cynic. He has nothing but contempt
for the way Jim takes his punishment to heart. Chester is
trying to launch a business venture hauling guano (sea bird
manure used as fertilizer) from a remote island, and he wants a
man like Jim--ruined but capable, with absolutely no other
prospects--to oversee the workers. Marlow is horrified. It's a
crackpot scheme: Chester's desolate island has been known to be
without rainfall for as much as a year. But what really
troubles Marlow is the idea of the sensitive, idealistic Jim
trapped at such hellish work, and for such an unscrupulous boss.
He refuses to help Chester convince Jim.

Chester's business partner is an ancient sailor named Robinson,

pathetically senile now but known in his day by the nickname
"Holy-Terror." Robinson, a seal hunter and opium smuggler, was
apparently even more of a scoundrel than Chester. On one
occasion, when he was shipwrecked, he ate his companions. Three
weeks after his rescue, according to Chester, Robinson was
completely recovered; and the scandal of his cannibalism didn't
bother him at all. The amoral Robinson forms a telling contrast
to Jim, who is about to spend several years running from his
reputation, unable to bear the mention of the Patna scandal.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER FIFTEEN

In a comic echo of the Chester episode, Marlow now must fend off
a businessman "fresh from Madagascar," who wants to involve him
in some obscure venture. Marlow finally frees himself and goes
in search of Jim. Marlow finds Jim stunned by his misfortune
and brings him back to his quarters so that he can at least
suffer in privacy. Marlow's description of the lengths to which
he goes to make himself unobtrusive is funny, or it would be if
Jim weren't so deeply anguished.

Jim is now at low ebb: utter disgrace, no future, nowhere to

go. He might as well be dead, Marlow reflects--death would make
things easier for Jim, and for Marlow as well. The figures of
Chester and Robinson keep flashing into his thoughts. He begins
to see that Chester's offer had a certain point. Where else is
Jim going to find work? The end result of all this reflection
is a dawning sense of responsibility. Of course, Jim has no
particular claim on Marlow. But Marlow knows that if he doesn't
intercede in some way, Jim's future is practically hopeless.
You might compare Marlow's willingness to accept responsibility
for the fate of others with Jim's behavior, both earlier on the
Patna, and later on Patusan.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Marlow drops the thread of the story and jumps forward,

mentioning the trying period when Jim worked for ship chandlers.
He also refers, rather mysteriously, to Jim's later success,
when he was "loved, trusted, admired" and treated as though he
really were a hero. Thinking back to Chapter One, you may
remember one of the first things the narrator mentioned about
Jim: In the jungle village where he fled after something
terrible had happened, he earned the title "Tuan Jim"--Lord
Jim.

Marlow also lets drop, in passing, that it was lucky he

protected Jim from Chester's offer. Chester and his crew ended
up sailing for his guano island and disappearing, without a
trace, in a hurricane.

Marlow finds that he still has difficulty making up his mind

about Jim. "He was not clear." Part of what disturbs him is
"that he made so much of his disgrace while it is the guilt
alone that matters." In other words, Jim focuses on saving his
ruined reputation. But Marlow believes that what others think
of you is far less important than what you know, in your
conscience, about yourself. Do you sympathize with Marlow's
belief? If so, why? How does it compare with Brierly's
beliefs? Jim had made the same argument in Chapters Ten and
Twelve, when he insisted that the Patna officers' story was of
no consequence to him; what mattered was the truth he had to
live with. But from Jim's account of the Patna disaster, Marlow
isn't sure that Jim has faced that truth. Jim is too eager to
lay the responsibility for his jumping at somebody else's
doorstep. Marlow knows he still has romantic illusions about
himself. Jim still thinks that, given the right circumstances,
he can be a hero. (Marlow's allusions to Jim's heroic future at
least hint that Jim may be right.) It's the very fineness of
Jim's sensibilities that allows him to keep deluding himself. A
"little coarser nature," Marlow reflects, would have had to come
to terms with himself and admit that he's no hero. A "still
coarser" nature--for example, Holy-Terror Robinson (Chapter
Fourteen)--wouldn't care.
These suspicions find support in what Jim, still suffering in
Marlow's hotel room, has to say for himself. He's so certain
he'll get a second chance that he's apparently learned nothing
about himself. In fact, he somehow turns the whole scandal into
proof of his spunk: "If this business couldn't knock me over,"
he tells Marlow, then nothing can. When Marlow comments, "I at
least had no illusions," the unstated corollary is that Jim has
too many. Does Jim ever learn?

After an awkward exchange in which Marlow remains noncommittal

on the topic of Jim's guilt, Jim prepares to leave. At once
Marlow realizes that he couldn't forgive himself if he let Jim
disappear. There are two reasons for this. One, already noted,
is that Marlow feels responsible for Jim: He's the only thing
standing between Jim and the Chesters of the world. The other
reason may be less apparent because Marlow tends to be reticent
about it: He's grown attached to Jim. And he's about to prove
his friendship.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

A storm rages outside the hotel--a reflection of Jim's turbulent

emotions. As Jim gradually calms down in this chapter, so does
the storm.

Marlow tries to convince Jim to accept his help. At first Jim,

who is still clutching at his pride, resists the proposal,
thinking that Marlow is offering to lend him money. But Marlow
explains that while Jim has been pacing and brooding, he's been
writing a letter to a man he knows. It's a letter of
recommendation, in which he speaks of Jim in terms only used
when speaking of a very close friend. Since Marlow has known
Jim only briefly, he's going out on a limb to recommend him in
such terms. But his warm affection for Jim is also apparent.

Jim is so overcome with gratitude that Marlow is embarrassed.

Dealing with emotion obviously isn't his strong point. However,
there's an element in Jim's extravagance that disturbs Marlow
for a more serious reason. Marlow believes his gesture is a
small thing: He's simply offered Jim a job as a way to keep him
from starving. But Jim's elation comes in part from thinking
that Marlow has validated his own romantic view of himself. He
exits declaring that Marlow has given him a chance to start over
"with a clean slate." In Marlow's view there's no such thing as
a clean slate, and Jim is foolish if he hasn't learned a lesson
(and forsaken some of his illusions) from abandoning the Patna.
Jim, in contrast, would like to pretend that the Patna incident
never happened. He wants to believe that his action had nothing
to do with his true nature. Now he's rejoicing, to Marlow's
discomfort, as though he thinks Marlow believes the same
thing.

NOTE: MARLOW'S FATALISM. "A clean slate, did he say? As if

the initial word of each our destiny were not graven in
imperishable characters upon the face of a rock!" These words,
which close the chapter, are frequently cited by readers
commenting on Lord Jim. You should keep them in mind as you
read the rest of the novel, because they have important
implications. The second half of Lord Jim is about Jim's second
chance, and the question for you to consider will be: Does Jim
make up for his cowardly act, or is his nature such that he
can't help repeating his mistakes? There won't be an obvious
answer--you'll have to sift through the evidence and make up
your own mind. Conrad's fatalistic words suggest that nobody
can escape his destiny, that Jim will repeat his mistakes. If
that's the case, then Jim's certainty that he can become a hero
would be completely misguided. He's had one chance, and he's
failed; if his destiny is really engraved in rock, there's no
reason to think a second chance would make any difference.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

In this chapter, Marlow narrates the painful episode of Jim's

first job after the Patna inquiry. His employer is a Mr.
Denver, the owner of a rice mill and the friend to whom Marlow
had written the letter of recommendation. Denver is a wary old
bachelor, with little trust in other human beings. Still, he
grows so attached to Jim that he seems likely to make the young
man his heir.

But a horrible coincidence brings the obnoxious little second

engineer of the Patna to the rice mill. He doesn't expose Jim,
but his behavior suggests he has blackmail in the back of his
mind. Crestfallen, Jim runs away. Poor, wounded Mr. Denver
gives every indication that he would have been willing to
forgive Jim for anything. But forgiveness isn't enough for
Jim--he wants that clean slate. He wants to live as though he
never jumped off the Patna. He may be demanding the impossible.
But at least you can't accuse him of being a fortune hunter.

Jim's next job is much less glorious. He works as a runner for

the ship chandlers Egstrom & Blake, sailing out in a small boat
to greet arriving vessels and talk their commanders into trading
with his employers. One indication of his fall in status is the
way he's addressed. At Denver's he was "Mr. James." At Egstrom
& Blake's he's "Jimmy" or even "Mr. What's-your-name."

NOTE: At last the plot has arrived at the point where Chapter
One began. You may want to thumb back now and look at those
opening paragraphs. Many of the allusions that were mysterious
when you started reading will be clear by now.

Bad luck strikes Jim here, too. One day conversation turns to
the Patna, and kindly Mr. Egstrom drops the remark that he
wouldn't want to be in the same room with its officers. Jim
resigns at once.

Jim is being oversensitive. Egstrom's comment, it becomes

clear, was a casual exaggeration. Like Mr. Denver, he would
happily have forgiven Jim. But again, Jim is really running
from himself. In this connection, Egstrom's prediction that the
earth won't be big enough to hold Jim--meaning that his past
will catch up with him wherever he goes--strikes an ominous
note.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER NINETEEN

For several years Jim continues taking jobs and then fleeing
them as soon as his real identity becomes known. The more
desperately he tries to run from his past, the more inescapable
it becomes. Eventually Jim becomes well known in his part of
the world. Often he thinks he's hiding when everybody knows
exactly who he is.

Marlow finally suggests to Siegmund Yucker, who at this point is

employing Jim in Bangkok, that he send Jim "up country"--into
the jungle interior--to attend to Yucker Brothers' dealings.
Yucker is receptive to the idea. But an incident that evening
changes his mind. A Danish lieutenant in the Siamese navy
insults Jim in connection with the Patna incident. A brawl
ensues. Jim, ever ready to resent a slur (recall the yellow-cur
episode in Chapter Six), tosses the lieutenant into the local
river. Yucker is disgusted, and Marlow once again has to find
work for Jim, this time with De Jongh. But Marlow is becoming
worried, because Jim is less able to bounce back from setbacks.
What Jim wants is more than a living--"something in the nature
of an opportunity," a second chance to prove he's a hero.
(You'll note that "opportunity" is a word with much significance
in Lord Jim.)

At a loss, Marlow decides to seek advice from a merchant named

Stein, whom he describes as one of the most trustworthy men he
has ever known. Stein's younger days were loaded with
adventure, and he was a model of physical courage. Now he's a
serious naturalist, well-known in scientific circles for his
collection of butterflies and beetles.

NOTE: NARRATIVE CLUMSINESS. You may have noticed that Conrad's

device of having Marlow narrate Jim's story, so elegant in
Chapters Five through Seventeen, has grown a little awkward in
the last two chapters. Marlow can tell his listeners only what
he knows, so Conrad has to have him constantly trailing Jim,
getting his employers' side of the story and then getting Jim's.
Conrad might have made things easier on himself by having Marlow
get his information from Jim alone. But then you would lose the
picture of Jim as a slightly mad idealist that comes largely
from his employers--Jim certainly wouldn't portray himself that
way. Fortunately, Marlow is a sea captain, so Conrad has a good
excuse for sending him sailing from port to port.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER TWENTY

Before describing their interview, Marlow tells his listeners

something about Stein's background. He was born in Germany and
fled after participating in the unsuccessful revolutionary
movement of 1848, a background that suggests that Stein is, or
at least was, an idealist himself. He later worked with a Dutch
naturalist, who sparked his interest in butterflies and beetles
and brought him to the Malay Archipelago. Eventually he was
taken under the wing of a Scottish trader (whose name, you will
learn in Chapter Twenty-two, is Alexander M'Neil), who
bequeathed him his privileged trading position in the jungle
interior. Stein became involved in the struggle over the
succession to the native queen's throne, allying himself with
her younger son, Mohammed Bonso. The two men were "the heroes
of innumerable exploits." Stein married Mohammed Bonso's sister,
"the princess," and they had a daughter; but now Mohammed Bonso,
the princess, and the daughter are all dead. (This political
background will explain Stein's connections in the territory of
Patusan, to which Jim will be traveling shortly.) Does Stein
sound like the kind of person Jim wants to be?

Marlow and Stein first talk about butterflies. Stein is

examining a "rare specimen," and he tells Marlow the
hair-raising story of its capture. It happened in the period of
his alliance with Mohammed Bonso. He was the victim of an
ambush, but he successfully warded off his attackers--there were
"only seven" of them. (Marlow has already noted Stein's
exceptional physical courage.) The butterfly's shadow fell over
one of the men he had killed. Stein's deep emotion at catching
it ("I shook like a leaf with excitement") contrasts amusingly
with his perfect calm while defending his life.

NOTE: BUTTERFLIES AND BEETLES. Stein's collection of insects

has considerable symbolic importance. Beetles and butterflies
suggest two types of people. Likely candidates for the beetle
category include the skipper of the Patna and the two engineers.
Marlow had felt, when he first laid eyes on Jim, that he wanted
to see him "squirming like an impaled beetle" for his crime
(Chapter Five). That was before he knew anything about him. By
now his opinion has gone up--so far up that he associates Jim
with Stein's "rare specimen" of a butterfly. Jim is as superior
to the worldly corruption around him as the "magnificent
butterfly" Stein describes is to the "little heap of dirt" it
sits on. (The frequent descriptions of Jim outfitted in
spotless white in the midst of corruption or squalor support
this impression.) But Jim, unlike a butterfly, can't soar above
the mud, above the ugly and compromising facts--although he'd
like to. Stein has a similar disparity in mind when he
describes his butterfly as a "masterpiece" of nature and then
says, "Man is amazing, but he is not a masterpiece." Man is
amazing because he can dream, not quite a masterpiece because he
can't always live up to those dreams.

After Marlow has narrated Jim's story, Stein delivers his

diagnosis: "He is romantic." When Marlow inquires about a cure,
Stein replies that there's only one cure: death. The question,
paraphrasing Hamlet, isn't to be or not to be, but how to
be--how to go on living with a romantic nature. The romantic
wants to be "so fine as he can never be." His dreams are so big
that he can't make them come true, and that of course is "not
good."

NOTE: "IN THE DESTRUCTIVE ELEMENT IMMERSE." Stein doesn't

recommend that you give up dreaming--just the opposite. He
offers the following metaphor: "A man that is born falls into a
dream like a man who falls into the sea." If he tries to climb
out, he's likely to drown. "No! I tell you! The way is to the
destructive element submit yourself...."

No pronouncement in Lord Jim has aroused so much disagreement.

No two interpretations are quite alike. In general, readers
fall into two schools. One school associates the sea with the
dream, and thus the dream becomes the destructive element you
should learn to live with. (Presumably it's destructive because
you wear yourself out trying to attain it.) The other school
argues that the sea represents harsh reality, the "facts" that
are destructive because they demolish dreams. Part of the
confusion you can blame on Conrad. The metaphor isn't fully
carried out: The sea is there, but where's the land?

However, if it's difficult to assign a precise meaning to

Stein's metaphor, the general sense of his words is clear: keep
following the dream. Being a romantic "is very bad--very
bad.... Very good, too." It's very bad, in Jim's case, because
dreaming impossible dreams makes him thoroughly impractical.
But it's also very good, because it underlies his idealism.
Continuing to dream is better than becoming a beetle-like cynic.
Jim is the troubled person he is because of the "inward pain"
that comes from the distance between his dreams and his
abilities.

Ultimately, Stein can't advise Jim "how to be." When he tries,

the words fail him. Some things, he admits, can't be
explained--implying that you can learn them only through
experience.

Marlow notes that Stein is as much a romantic as Jim, but with

one difference. Stein has followed his dream unfalteringly.
But Jim faltered on the night he jumped from the Patna.

Stein's response offers some hope that Jim will get a second
chance. He declares that Marlow can't know how many
opportunities he let escape. When Marlow retorts that Jim
surely let one chance escape, Stein replies that everybody is
guilty of that. Not everybody has abandoned the Patna, but
we've all done things we would like to undo. And everybody
hopes for a second chance. Why do you suppose Conrad created a
character like Stein to give Jim a second chance?

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The next morning Stein tells Marlow about the district of

Patusan, where he has decided to send Jim as his trade
representative. Patusan is hidden away 40 miles upriver, and
few Europeans have ever been there. Stein's current
representative, a Malayan-born Portuguese named Cornelius, is
unsatisfactory. Stein wants him replaced, though Cornelius will
probably choose to stay in Patusan with his daughter.

Perhaps the most striking image in the second half of the novel,
first described in this chapter, is the moon rising above the
two steep hills that overlook the village of Patusan. The hills
are so close together that they might be two fissured halves of
one peak. If Jim has been buried in Patusan, Marlow's
description suggests a rebirth (Jim's "second chance"): The
moon rises "as if escaping from a yawning grave in gentle
triumph." Perhaps the "everlasting deep hole" into which Jim
thought he had jumped (Chapter Nine) isn't everlasting after
all. (But this symbol also has a negative side, which will be
discussed in Chapter Twenty-four.)

NOTE: BURIAL IMAGERY. Brierly said of Jim (Chapter Six), "Let

him creep twenty feet underground and stay there!"--a remark
Marlow now recalls. Marlow himself said (Chapter Fifteen), "To
bury him would have been such an easy kindness!" Now Stein and
Marlow speak of "burying" him in Patusan. The
implication--borne out by the eloquent passage about exile later
in the chapter--is that leaving one's civilization is a death of
sorts. Patusan has already "been used as a grave for some sin,
transgression, or misfortune" of the half-Dutch, half-Malay
woman who was Cornelius' wife but is now dead. (This may be a
hint that Cornelius wasn't the real father of her child.)

Marlow calls Jim "the youngest human being in existence" because

Jim hasn't "grown up" as Marlow has, in the sense of giving up
his illusions. Is that the only way Jim hasn't grown up? The
chapter ends with a long, rambling, and very beautiful paragraph
on the subject of exile. Marlow, of course, is considering
Jim's exile from England and, now, from European civilization.
But the passage is doubly poignant when you relate it to
Conrad's self-imposed exile from his native Poland. It's
possible he was thinking of his own sadness when he wrote of
Jim's intense loneliness.

Marlow closes by saying, "My last words about Jim shall be

few"--a pretty strange statement considering that his "last
words" stretch out for another 24 chapters. But in fact Conrad
never intended to develop Patusan at length. By the time he
reached this point, he thought that he was almost through with
the novel. The growth of the Patusan chapters apparently
surprised him as much as anybody. But don't you think it's
curious that he didn't delete that remark when he revised the
serial version for book publication?

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Patusan was once a seat of the pepper trade, but commerce has
dwindled so far that now Stein is the only outsider doing
business in the district. There is a mentally retarded Sultan,
but the real power rests with his uncle, the Rajah Allang, a
horrible ruler who robs and terrorizes the Malay populace.
Marlow flashes forward to an audience Jim has with the Rajah.
The image is memorable: Jim splendid, almost godlike in his
immaculate white, surrounded by the dirty Rajah Allang and his
squalid court.

Stein's reason for helping Jim is sentimental. He wants to

honor the memory of Alexander M'Neil (mentioned in Chapter
Twenty), a man who had helped him, by helping one of his
countrymen. Though Jim comes "from a long way south of the
Tweed" (a river that forms part of the border between Scotland
and England), his being English, if not Scottish, is enough for
Stein.

As usual, Jim is extravagantly grateful, and Marlow is

embarrassed and gruff. Jim particularly appreciates the way
Marlow has always trusted him. Marlow replies that he only
wishes Jim could trust himself more. The remark makes Jim
uneasy. Obviously he still fears that jumping off the Patna
proved something about himself he doesn't want to believe.

NOTE: REALISM AND ROMANCE. Look at the sentence that begins

this chapter: "The conquest of love, honour, men's
confidence--the pride of it, the power of it, are fit materials
for an heroic tale...." As a matter of fact, while the first
half of Lord Jim was psychologically realistic, the second half
is practically a storybook romance (except that few storybook
heroes have a Patna in their pasts). The assumptions of the
second half are radically different from those of the first
half. Jim's romantic fantasies have so far earned him a good
deal of scorn--they were dreams that could never come true.
Now, suddenly, they seem to come true, at least for a while.

This isn't to say that the second half doesn't succeed on its
own terms. What it may not do is succeed on the terms of the
first half--a different definition of reality seems to operate
in each part. Conrad himself recognized the flaw, calling the
cleavage between the two parts "the plague spot" of the novel.
As you read you should note the differences between the two
parts, then decide whether or not the novel forms a unified
whole in spite of them.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Jim returns from a conference with Stein, who has given him a
silver ring as a token for a certain Doramin. This Doramin, an
ally from the Mohammed Bonso days, is now one of the most
powerful men in Patusan. Stein once saved his life; Doramin
gave him the ring when they parted.

Jim is as elated about his prospects, and as talkative as you'd

expect of someone who's never grown up. Marlow suddenly feels
"thoroughly sick of him." He doesn't like hearing Jim boast
about what he'll do--though he admits, returning to an old
theme, that illusions are the privilege of youth. Marlow
reprimands Jim for approaching his journey in the wrong frame of
mind. Jim cuts at once to the root of what's bothering Marlow:
He remembers the Patna, as everybody does. Marlow retorts that
it's Jim who keeps remembering.

Marlow gives Jim a revolver, which he has every reason to think

Jim will need in strife-torn Patusan. But when Jim rushes off
to the ship that's to carry him to the mouth of the Patusan
river, Marlow notices that he forgot the cartridges and takes
off in pursuit. When he reaches Jim's ship, he has a talk with
the half-caste skipper, whose conversation is peppered with
malapropisms (comic misuses of words). Despite his bad English,
the skipper impresses on Marlow that the current situation in
Patusan is dangerous. He knows, having almost been killed when
he sailed there a year ago. In his view, Jim is as good as
dead.

Perhaps because he's so frightened for Jim, Marlow loses some of

his usual embarrassment when it comes time to say goodbye. The
two men share "a moment of real and profound intimacy," with Jim
promising he'll be careful, like a boy reassuring an anxious
parent. But Marlow knows that Jim is doing the right thing, and
he admits sadly to his listeners that Jim's accusation was fair:
Marlow really did remember "his--his misfortunes" (that's as
harsh a word as he can bring himself to use) against him. Jim
cries out something as he sails away--either "You shall hear of
me" or "You shall hear from me." Considering that he wants so
badly to be a hero, and that he's shutting the door on his old
life, it's probably the former.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

In order for Marlow to continue narrating the story, Conrad has

to give him a way of having heard it. So he sends Marlow
himself to Patusan, two years after Jim. Marlow describes
hearing Jim called "Tuan Jim" and talks about his fame. Jim's
prediction that Marlow would hear of him has come to pass.

The narrative returns to Jim's first approach. The Patusan

river has long been closed; Jim, the first white man to travel
upstream for some time, sits tense, attentive to possible
dangers. Meanwhile, his opportunity, his second chance, sits
"veiled by his side like an Eastern bride"--an image that will
recur at the very end of the novel.

Jim travels upriver with an unloaded gun, an act that Marlow, in

retrospect, considers foolish. But Jim insists he was lucky the
gun wasn't loaded. Otherwise he might have shot into the
hostile crowd that threatened him when he arrived. They, in
turn, would have killed him on the spot.

His staying alive, Jim reflects, was as fortunate for Patusan as

it was for himself. He's brought peace to the land; there's not
one household where he isn't trusted. Marlow assures Jim he
knew all along that he was "all right," but Jim is skeptical.
In fact, you know from Marlow's remark about remembering, at the
end of the last chapter, that he wasn't sure about Jim at all.
And he still isn't, even as he tells the story. Marlow keeps
dropping little hints that something in Jim's success makes him
uneasy.

The image of the moon rising, so striking in Chapter Twenty-one,

recurs here in a more disturbing context. Declaring that
sunlight "is all we have to live by" and thus equating it with
truth, Marlow calls moonlight "misleading and confusing" because
it gives form to unreal shadows. Thus, even though Marlow
insists that Jim's greatness is "as genuine as any man ever
achieved," the recurring link between the Patusan moonlight and
Jim's exploits creates an aura of doubt. Are Jim's achievements
real or illusory? Has he made up for deserting the Patna, or is
he still capable of the same folly? The similarity between the
words Patna and Patusan isn't very reassuring. Will Patusan
turn out to be a repeat of the Patna?

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Marlow describes an audience the Rajah Allang (also called Tunku

Allang) holds with Jim and him. As they drink the rajah's
coffee, Marlow realizes that it may be poisoned. The rajah
hates Jim and has good reason to kill him. Jim drinks his
coffee in order to demonstrate his fearlessness. Apparently it
works; the rajah is terrified of him.

The story returns to Jim's arrival in Patusan. He is

immediately taken prisoner by the rajah. On the third day he
escapes by leaping over the stockade wall. After frantic
effort, he finally reaches old Doramin, Stein's friend, and
shows him the ring. Doramin puts him under his protection.

Doramin's power is second only to the rajah's. He leads a

faction of Bugis immigrants from the island of Celebes. The
friction in Patusan has to do with trade. There is no free
trade. The rajah holds a monopoly on commerce. The penalty for
trading with anybody else is death.

A third faction is led by an "Arab half-breed" and religious

fanatic named Sherif Ali. His followers are the bush people of
the interior, whom he's incited to destructive rampages. He has
established a stronghold on one of the twin peaks overlooking
the village. He's aligned with neither the rajah's nor
Doramin's faction, and both groups are extremely fearful of
him.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Marlow describes the wealthy, dignified Doramin, so massive that

he can stand and walk only with assistance. Significantly,
Doramin carries an immense pair of pistols that Stein presented
to him in exchange for the ring. Doramin's only son, Dain Waris
("Dain" is Malay for "heir"), has become Jim's best friend in
Patusan.

In describing Dain Waris' virtues, Marlow exposes some of his

own racist assumptions. The highest praise he can offer is that
Dain Waris thinks like a white man. He shows "courage in the
open" (rather than furtiveness?). In addition, his "European
mind" gives him "an unobscured vision, a tenacity of purpose, a
touch of altruism"--implying that other Malays are nearsighted,
irresolute, and selfish. This kind of racism, though
commonplace in the imperial Britain of Marlow's day, doesn't
surface in Lord Jim very often. Dain Waris, in any case, is
distinguished and brave, and he's adored by his parents.

NOTE: FANTASY. Conrad must have perceived the storybook turn

his novel had taken. "They are like people in a book, aren't
they?" Jim asks Marlow. Earlier (Chapter Twenty-three), when
Stein gave him the ring, he had said, "It's like something you
read of in books." Do you think the quotations suggest a certain
self-consciousness on Conrad's part? Or is Jim confusing
reality with the romances he had read?

Marlow describes the preparations leading to the defeat of

Sherif Ali. The whole undertaking is Jim's idea, and he
promises to pay with his life if it fails. (This isn't the last
time he'll make such a romantically heroic promise.) The plan
calls, in part, for hauling cannon up the hill across from
Sherif Ali's "impregnable" camp. Jim plans the complex assault,
and he infects Doramin's men with his own enthusiasm, proving
himself a genuine leader. For once his vivid imagination works
for him, not against him.

NOTE: MORE LIGHT IMAGERY. Even as Marlow hears Jim tell the
story, he connects the landscape of Patusan with gloom--"the
light fell on it as if into an abyss," he notes ominously. Even
now he can't help remembering Jim's disgrace "like a shadow in
the light."

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Marlow finishes narrating the defeat of Sherif Ali. With the

cannon firing from one peak, Jim and Dain Waris lead the
attackers up the other. Conquest is immediate and total, an
outcome Jim never doubted. He had once insisted to Marlow
(Chapter Seven) that circumstances on the Patna caught him by
surprise but proved nothing about his bravery: "It is all in
being ready." Now he's proved that under the right circumstances
he can be courageous indeed. His dreams have come true.

Jim's reputation immediately grows to mythic proportions. Even

his laughter is "Homeric," calling to mind the larger-than-life
heroes of the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Malays regard him as a
white god, and he becomes a local Solomon, meting out justice,
settling disputes. Jim complains of the responsibility, but of
course the trust of so many people is extremely important to the
man who once betrayed the trust of 800 pilgrims.

Marlow briefly describes Tamb' Itam, Jim's personal servant. He

is, like Jim, a stranger to Patusan, a dark-skinned Malay from
the north, morose and taciturn. His devotion to Jim is almost
fanatical.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

When the country people whom Sherif Ali has driven from their
villages return to them, Jim chooses the headmen. This is one
source of his political power. He also protects the Rajah
Allang from the vengeance of Doramin's Bugis followers. This is
why the Rajah can't afford to poison Jim's coffee: Jim is a
safeguard, as well as a threat.

Marlow describes an interview with Doramin. The old man makes

no secret of his ambitions for his son, Dain Waris: He wants to
see him as ruler of Patusan. Partly for this reason, he's
disgruntled when Marlow assures him that Jim won't ever leave.
In addition to curiosity (what could make Jim forsake his own
people?), there's a hint of resentment in his surprise.

Marlow now turns to a new subject: Jim's love life. Jim has
fallen in love with the daughter of Cornelius, the man who was
Stein's representative in Patusan before Jim's arrival.
Actually, Cornelius is not the woman's real father. Cornelius'
wife, now dead, apparently married him after she had become
pregnant, to save the girl from illegitimacy. The daughter has
her mother's fine, sensitive nature. Cornelius, in contrast, is
"awful," "unspeakable."

Jim calls her by a word that translates as "Jewel." The name has
given rise to another "Jim-myth," which Marlow encounters some
230 miles south of the Patusan River. Jim, it's rumored, has
gotten possession of a precious "jewel," supposedly a tremendous
emerald. Marlow recounts at some length the version he hears
from a seedy government official, as well as the way various
others embroider the tale.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Marlow continues his description of Jewel. She has the

qualities you would expect of the heroine of a romance--beauty,
devotion, charm. But there's something additional: her
affection is "vigilant." Marlow notices an anxiety in her love,
as if she can sense that something is threatening Jim. Marlow
describes their relationship, which on the surface looks
perfect, as an "uneasy romance."

NOTE: Jim is in a certain amount of danger from the Rajah

Allang. But Marlow's vaguely ominous tone, combined with the
authority of Jewel's intuition, hints at a deeper danger. The
reader, of course, knows what Jewel can't: that Jim is hiding
the secret of his past. So the shadow of the Patna incident
remains visible on the periphery of an otherwise sunny
romance.

Marlow talks some more about Tamb' Itam, another figure typical
in this kind of tale. Tamb' Itam is silent, alert, and such a
devoted servant that he spends his nights sleeping on Jim's
verandah, rather than at home with his family.

Finally, Marlow comes to Cornelius, Jewel's legal father.

Cornelius is about as disgusting as a man can become:
"unsavoury," "abject," "a loathsome insect," "a repulsive
beetle." He is, in fact, the clearest instance of the "beetle"
type (see the Note in Chapter Twenty) in the novel. During the
period after Jim's escape from the Rajah's stockade, but before
the attack on Sherif Ali, Jim goes to live with Cornelius and
Jewel in the decaying house belonging to Stein's Trading
Company. Cornelius tends to speak of his dead wife, Jewel's
mother, in a way that's so nasty it makes Jewel cry. So Jim has
to forbid him to talk about her. Cornelius is abjectly
courteous to Jim, but he viciously resents him. (After all,
Stein has sent Jim to Patusan as his replacement.) There are
also indications that he's mishandled Stein's business, though
whether from dishonesty or incompetence isn't clear.

Jim, meanwhile, has other worries. As long as he was living in

the Bugis quarter of Patusan, he had enjoyed Doramin's
protection from the Rajah Allang's vengeance. He's moved in
with Cornelius out of his sense of responsibility to Stein. Now
rumors begin to reach him that the Rajah is planning his
death.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER THIRTY

You now get a vivid picture of the way Cornelius abuses

Jewel--screaming at her, calling her and her mother names,
flinging dirt at her, and demanding almost in the same breath
that she respect him and call him "father." But she has too much
spirit to suffer meekly. She knows how to turn on Cornelius and
make him "writhe" with a word or two.

Cornelius' behavior is so disgusting that Jim would like to

leave. He'd be safer in Doramin's quarter, anyway. Besides,
his original reason for moving in--business responsibilities to
Stein--has disappeared. Cornelius has already embezzled
whatever he could get his hands on. There are no more goods or
money, no account books, and thus no reason to stay--no reason,
that is, except Jewel. Leaving her, Marlow notes, would seem
like a "base desertion"--a phrase that intentionally recalls
what happened on the Patna.

One night Cornelius offers to smuggle Jim out of Patusan for

$80. (Since Jim has no intention of leaving and Cornelius is so
eager to get rid of him, wouldn't it make more sense for
Cornelius to do the paying?) When Jim refuses, Cornelius
declares that he can no longer be responsible for Jim--as if he
ever had been. His warning is absurd on the surface, but it
suggests that Cornelius knows something Jim doesn't. A bizarre
night follows. Nobody sleeps. Jim lies awake hatching his plan
for defeating Sherif Ali. Jewel stands watch outside.
Cornelius sneaks around suspiciously, and there seem to be some
others around, too--assassins, perhaps. Jim is feeling so edgy
that finally he loses his temper completely and gives Cornelius
the bawling-out of his life.

NOTE: The hints that there are assassins nearby will be

reinforced in the next chapter. The native Malays are scared to
death of Jim, so the spectacle of him screaming in a strange
language (English) probably does much to impress them, and to
protect Jim.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

The next morning Jim urges Doramin and his men to take action
against Sherif Ali. The Bugis are worried because Sherif Ali is
allying himself with the Rajah Allang. His men have been
encouraging villagers to kill the Muslim strangers, Doramin's
followers.

NOTE: SKEWED TIME. Even though the second half of Lord Jim is
more straightforward in technique than the first half, the time
scheme remains complex and events do not always follow in
chronological order. The events that Marlow is speaking about
now happened earlier in time than the defeat of Sherif Ali
(Chapters Twenty-six and Twenty-seven).

That night Jewel wakes Jim urgently, claiming there are killers
lying in wait for him. At first, Jim is annoyed. He's had so
many death threats recently that he's begun disregarding them.

When Jim tells Marlow that at this point he wasn't acting like
himself, Marlow contradicts him, "Oh yes. You were though." The
reply is significant. He means that the true Jim doesn't fear
for his life--suggesting, in turn, that the cowardly Jim of the
Patna wasn't the real Jim. It's not direct, but it's as close
as Marlow comes to dismissing Jim's transgression out-and-out.

As Jewel warns Jim, he realizes how deeply he loves her.

Cornelius, meanwhile, is skulking about, or seems to be. Jim
asks who's to give the signal to attack him, and Jewel doesn't
answer--but Cornelius is definitely implicated.

Jewel finally takes Jim to the storehouse, where the killers are
hiding under mats. They turn out to be Sherif Ali's men, not
the Rajah's. One of them rushes him with a kriss (dagger), and
Jim easily shoots him. The other three quickly come out of
hiding and surrender.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

That night, Jewel and Jim declare their love.

NOTE: SYMBOLIC DETAIL. Like Jim, Jewel is dressed in white,

bathed in light--details that imply her superiority to the
darkness, the corruption around her. She seems to glide
"without touching the earth," and in the last image in the
chapter, when she raises her arms, her sleeves billow "like
unfolding wings." She could almost be a butterfly (see the note
in Chapter Twenty), or an angel.

Marlow now shifts the scene to a conversation he and Jim have on

Marlow's last day in Patusan. You learn from it that Jim has
not forgotten, and can never forget, the Patna. He's loved and
he's trusted and he's revered, but there will always be
self-doubt at the back of his mind. And Marlow, for all his
warmth and admiration, ultimately can't give Jim the reassurance
he would like. When Jim says that Marlow wouldn't trust Jim as
one of his ship's officers, Marlow begs for him to stop
torturing himself. But Marlow can't bring himself to say,
"You're wrong. I would trust you." Jim understands--perhaps he
agrees--but there's a current of pain in his words. Would you
trust Jim?
NOTE: DARKNESS. As they speak, Marlow notices "the gradual
darkening of the river, of the air" as night falls. Conrad
calls attention to his impression in a way that signals symbolic
intent. Darkness has been associated, generally, with the
corrupt, the deceitful, the bad. The image is
pessimistic--counteracting the optimism that Marlow expressed
(obliquely) in Chapter Thirty-one. By now it should be clear
that he can't reach a final judgment, positive or negative,
about Jim.

Jim leaves, and Jewel finds Marlow. As they talk, it becomes

apparent that she's afraid Jim will leave Patusan, as the whites
who visit the village always seem to do.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Jewel's interview with Marlow is mostly about whether Jim will

stay in Patusan. He has sworn he'll never leave, but she still
doubts him. Part of her mistrust stems from her mother's
experience with her father: He had promised not to abandon her
and betrayed his promise. Jewel describes her mother's death,
with Cornelius beating on the door demanding "Let me in!" as her
mother wept on her deathbed.

NOTE: A WORLD OF DISORDER. The description horrifies Marlow.

For a moment, he says, "I had a view of a world that seemed to
wear a vast and dismal aspect of disorder." His words recall the
passage, in Chapter Five, about how ghastly it is to lose your
confidence in the "fixed standard of conduct." The world seems
suddenly askew, and utterly amoral. Morality takes on the
aspect of a sham constructed for our convenience. Marlow isn't
very reassuring; he says he snapped out of his vision for one
reason: "One must--don't you know?" His argument for believing
in the fixed standard was similarly practical, and dodged the
issue of whether that standard is based on truth. If you lose
your belief in it, he said, you can't survive.

Jewel knows there's something in Jim's past that's stronger than

his love. She senses his obsessive guilt, but she doesn't seem
to know the details of the Patna incident. Marlow tries to calm
her fears, because he knows that Jim's guilt will, if anything,
keep him in Patusan. But he's faced with the delicate task of
reassuring her in a way that won't belittle Jim. As she demands
whether Jim isn't more true," "more brave" than other men,
Marlow has to dodge her questions. For example, he says, "Fear
will never drive him away from you."

To still Jewel's fears, Marlow says, would require a "poisoned

shaft dipped in a lie too subtle to be found on earth." There's
a distinct pessimism in this image of a lie, because it grants
that Jewel's fear has some truth at the bottom of it. Jewel
senses that Jim's guilt is dangerous because it's stronger than
his love, and Marlow, though he can't yet say why, senses that
she's right.

Finally, the difficulty of reassuring Jewel drives Marlow to

harshness. He says Jim will stay because nobody else wants him,
and when she presses him for the reason, he tells her brutally,
"Because he is not good enough." Jewel replies that Jim said the
same thing--but, she snaps, it's a lie.

NOTE: "NOT GOOD ENOUGH." Marlow's statement might be just

another of his mood swings (one moment approving Jim, condemning
him the next), except that this time he adds a sentence that
radically changes his meaning: "Nobody, nobody is good enough."
This suggests that the "fixed standard of conduct" (Chapter
Five), necessary though it may be, is so artificial and
inflexible that any one of us may run up against it at some time
or other. Marlow doesn't expand on this intriguing statement
(perhaps because the implications are too disturbing), but the
idea seems to be that we shouldn't judge Jim too harshly because
each one of us is capable, under the right circumstances, of
jumping off a Patna. Jim had made this argument, rather feebly,
when he told Marlow (Chapters Seven and Eight) that no one had a
right to judge him because no one had been put to the test as he
had. Marlow had resisted that argument on the grounds that it
would weaken the "fixed standard of conduct" to the point of
collapse. His attitude here is altogether more lenient--but, as
usual, it's not his last word on Jim.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Continuing the theme of the last chapter, Marlow pauses for some
gloomy, even cynical, reflections. He quotes, sarcastically,
the Latin of the Vulgate Bible: "Great is truth, and mighty
above all things." Truth doesn't prevail; neither does justice.
What rules in this arbitrary world is Fortune. Fortune is with
Jim now, and he's almost satisfied--which is more than most
people can claim.

NOTE: OMINOUS IMAGES. By the time Marlow and Jewel have

finished their talk, night has fallen. The night-imagery
suggests gloom, illusion. Jim finds them, and although he and
Jewel greet each other with their usual affection, the greeting
sounds "like a moan" to Marlow. He finds it "too confoundedly
awful." The moon-over-Patusan image (see the Notes in Chapters
Twenty-one and Twenty-four) assumes its most negative aspect,
turning the world into the semblance of a large grave. Its
light casts doubt on everything Jim has accomplished in Patusan:
"Nothing on earth seemed less real than his plans, his energy,
and his enthusiasm...." In this context, Marlow's reflections
about Jim's being "almost" satisfied seem particularly ominous.
What keeps Jim from being quite satisfied is his lingering guilt
about the Patna. All this emphasis hints that it still has a
dangerous power over him.

Marlow is now waylaid by Cornelius, whom he's avoided the entire

month he's been in Patusan. Cornelius wants Marlow to talk Jim
into paying him for Jewel. He promises Marlow that he'll also
take her back when Jim leaves Patusan. When Marlow assures him
that Jim won't leave, Cornelius is infuriated--he hates Jim.

NOTE: "A LITTLE CHILD." Amid his curses, Cornelius makes one
shrewd observation about Jim: "He's no more than a little child
here." Marlow himself constantly plays up the boyish side of his
young friend. Jim is as impulsive and inarticulate and
brash--and, on some level, as innocent--as a child. And as
Marlow likes to point out, Jim has retained the illusions that
most of us (including Marlow) shed when we grow up.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Jim accompanies Marlow down the river as he departs. It's a

melancholy scene, both men silent and thoughtful. When they
reach the ocean, Marlow feels an "elation of freedom" at the
view. Poor Jim, who knows he can never go back, is more
subdued. A couple of Malays approach and start complaining to
Jim about some misdeed of the rajah's, and Marlow watches him
again playing peacemaker and Solomon. They talk of the way Jim
has captured his opportunity, but there's a sadness, a
hesitancy, in Jim's conversation. Happy as he is in Patusan,
thoughts of the wide world, and especially of home, make him
gloomy.

NOTE: LIGHT IMAGERY. In Marlow's last view of him, Jim is

dressed from head to toe in white. As the sun sets and the
beach darkens and Marlow's boat moves farther and farther away,
Jim is eventually just "a tiny white speck, that seemed to catch
all the light left in a darkened world." Even associating Jim
with all the positive aspects of white and light, he's
nevertheless surrounded by darkness. For Marlow he's a "white
figure... at the heart of a vast enigma"--a puzzle Marlow can't
ever solve. Originally that puzzle was the mystery of Jim's
behavior, but it's grown over the course of the novel until now
it's the whole "darkened world" itself. The "vast enigma"
Marlow faces is, ultimately, the cosmos: is it chaotic, amoral,
and "dark," or morally ordered and "light"?

With this chapter, Marlow's after-dinner talk comes to an end.

He's talked for a total of thirty-one chapters, a length some
early reviewers attacked as unbelievable. (One of them
estimated that he drones on for eleven hours.) Conrad defended
the credibility of his device (not very successfully) in the
"Author's Note" he added in 1917. Today most readers regard the
debate as irrelevant. We've grown used to far less realistic
novels, and suspending disbelief about the endurance of
after-dinner guests isn't a problem.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

The final stretch of the novel begins with a new, nameless

character, who was one of the after-dinner guests the night
Marlow told Jim's story. This "privileged man" receives a
packet containing what Marlow has learned about Jim since that
night.

NOTE: JIM'S EGOISM. The "privileged man" criticizes Jim's

retreat to Patusan, arguing that you can bring progress to
backward places only by representing your civilization, not
running away from it. (His position is couched in the racist
terms of British Imperialism, which you will probably find
offensive.) Marlow counters that Jim's egoism, his concentration
on himself, makes him a special case. Earlier (Chapter Sixteen)
Marlow had criticized Jim for paying more attention to his
reputation than to his guilt. So his egoism, his concern with
his guilt, now meets with measured approval. But as usual,
Marlow refuses to draw any final conclusions: "I affirm
nothing."

There are four items in Marlow's packet. First, an explanatory

letter, which makes up most of this chapter and the next.
Second, Marlow's narrative, which will form the remainder of the
novel. Third, a few tantalizing words in Jim's handwriting:
"An awful thing has happened. I must now at once...." Fourth,
an old letter from Jim's parson father, written before his son
signed on with the Patna.

NOTE: THE PARSON'S LETTER. Though Conrad gets some poignant

effects out of this letter, he has two deeper moral purposes in
quoting it. First, he contrasts the "easy morality" of the
letter with the incredible complexity of Jim's situation. Once
again the moral seems to be that those who haven't been tested
have little right to judge. The air of nostalgia for home
further increases sympathy for Jim.

The second, larger moral purpose is to contrast the

nearsightedness of a certain religious outlook with the
complexity of Marlow's (and Conrad's) agnosticism. Jim's family
lives a life of "easy morality" and "undisturbed rectitude"
because their morality has never been tested, their rectitude
has never been disturbed. Belief is easy, Conrad seems to be
saying, when you're not given any reason to doubt the moral
order of things. Marlow's own doubts about the fixed standard,
his fear that the cosmos may be ultimately amoral, obviously
don't attest to a firm religious faith.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Marlow turns his attention to a certain "Gentleman" Brown. He

doesn't say much about him--only enough for you to gather that
"Gentleman" is an inappropriate name for this villain.

NOTE: NARRATIVE STRUCTURE. In order for Marlow to have all the

information he needs to finish Jim's story, Conrad has to have
him speak to Gentleman Brown, who sets the catastrophe in
motion. So he has Marlow locate him in Bangkok, dying and eager
to talk. Do you think Conrad makes this coincidence as
convincing as he made, for example, Marlow's running into the
French lieutenant (Chapters Twelve and Thirteen)? Do you find
Conrad somewhat clumsy in bringing a major character into the
story at this late stage?

Marlow next tells about visiting Stein, eight months before his
meeting with Brown. On arriving, he's surprised to encounter
Tamb' Itam and another of the Patusan Malays, as well as Jewel.
He soon perceives that some kind of disaster has occurred.
Maddeningly, nobody will explain what happened--Conrad is still
playing his game of tantalizing the reader. Jewel claims Jim
has deserted her, and she refuses to forgive him. But when she
accuses him of being false, both Stein and Marlow jump to his
defense.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

We now move to the second item in the packet, the long narrative
Marlow enclosed. Gentleman Brown, it begins, is one of the most
savage pirates of the day. (His name comes from his supposedly
being the son of a baronet.) He has no fear of death, though
he's terrified of prison. But after 20 years as a pirate, he's
down on his luck--until he and his men manage to steal a Spanish
schooner. But even that success creates problems. A corrupt
government official blackmails Brown out of his only money, a
bag of silver dollars, and allows all the sails to be taken from
the ship, rendering it more or less useless. So Brown and his
men are forced to steal a second schooner. But this time they
have to operate so quickly that they escape with too little food
and water.

Brown then comes up with the idea of raiding Patusan. He knows

little about the village, but it looks defenseless enough on a
map. If all goes well he can extort food out of the villagers
and even frighten them into giving him money. He leaves the
schooner with two of his men at the mouth of the Patusan River,
and the other 14 pack into the schooner's long-boat and sail to
the village, assuming they'll have an easy time subduing the
populace. But they've been spotted. To their astonishment,
when they arrive the villagers open fire on them. An indecisive
battle follows. Two of Brown's men are wounded, and the Rajah's
boats cut off their retreat; but Brown and his men manage to
entrench themselves on a hill overlooking the Rajah's
stockade.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

As bad luck would have it, Jim is in the interior when the
pirates invade Patusan. In his absence, the villagers, close to
panic, call a meeting. Jewel urges strong and immediate action
to wipe out the invaders. Dain Waris shares her opinion, but he
refuses to speak up in the presence of his father, Doramin. And
Doramin, the most influential man present, won't give the order
to fight.

NOTE: DORAMIN'S SCHEME. In choosing this overly cautious

course, Doramin is acting purely out of self-interest. Knowing
how brave Dain Waris is, he fears his son might be injured or
killed attacking the invaders. So he orders him to take an
armed party and blockade the river about ten miles downstream.
This is, as it turns out, a tremendous mistake. Brown and his
men are virtually defenseless at this point. They could easily
be defeated. Doramin's conniving will boomerang on him, and
lead to a disaster he'll ultimately refuse to accept
responsibility for.
Meanwhile, the Rajah is doing his own conniving, through his
diplomatic representative, Kassim. The Rajah and Kassim hate
Doramin and his Bugis followers, and they hate Doramin's friend
Jim. Their idea is to ally themselves with Brown and rout the
Bugis before Jim's return. (Later on, according to their plan,
they can overpower Brown.) So Kassim takes Cornelius (who, of
course, also hates Jim) as an interpreter, and approaches Brown
for negotiations.

Brown is overjoyed, though he's careful not to show it. His

position had been all but hopeless; now, suddenly, it's
extremely promising. By allying himself with the Rajah, he may
be able to squeeze more wealth out of Patusan than he had ever
envisioned. He begins by getting a supply of provisions for his
starving men.

Cornelius' main concern is having Brown kill Jim the first

chance he gets. But Brown is more interested in double-dealing
with Kassim. The rumor has spread that Brown's ship, at the
mouth of the Patusan River, is loaded with guns and fighters.
(Actually, there are only two weary men on board.) Kassim urges
Brown to order the ship upstream for battle, failing to mention
the blockade that Dain Waris is setting up. Brown, for his
part, pretends to send for it. The deceitful Kassim and the
cunning Brown are pretty evenly matched.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER FORTY

Trapped on his hill, the bloodthirsty Brown is itching to kill

for the pleasure of it. "The lust of battle was upon him." He's
the opposite of Jim, whose joy is in the peace he's brought
Patusan. Trying to picture Jim, Brown can only imagine a
scoundrel like himself, robbing the village little by little.
He decides to team up with him so they can rob at a faster rate.
After that, he'll shoot him.

To petrify the villagers even more, Brown has one of his men
shoot a Bugis who thinks he's at a safe distance from the camp.
Brown knows that he and his men are outnumbered two hundred to
one, and their only chance is to scare the daylights out of the
villagers.

It looks as if the order Jim has established in Patusan is about

to collapse in bloodshed. Kassim is proceeding with his
double-dealing, having dispatched a message to Dain Waris that
the white men's ship is on its way up the river. His plan is to
weaken the Bugis by fighting. (He doesn't know Brown is
deceiving him and there's no ship coming.)

Once night falls, Brown starts worrying again: Rationally

considered, his chances really aren't very good. One of his men
heads down to the boat for some tobacco, and is surprised by
three shots in the stomach. The marksman turns out to be a
relative of the Bugis who was shot earlier. Doramin has sent
him down to deliver a message to Brown: There can be no peace
between the Bugis and the invaders on the hill. He's just
reached the river when he's startled to see the white man
clambering out of the boat. So he takes advantage of the
opportunity to avenge his kinsman, and turns himself into a
local hero. Brown's man is wounded but not killed, and he moans
horribly all night--until he's drowned by the morning tide.

Finally they hear a great clamor in the town, and Cornelius, who
has attached himself to them, explains: Jim is back. The noise
is a noise of celebration. Eager to deal with Jim, Brown wants
to know how he can reach him. Cornelius assures him there's no
need; Jim will come to Brown, because he's "not afraid of
anything." (Recall the Patna and you'll perceive the irony of
his words.) He urges Brown to shoot Jim as soon as he shows
himself.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Brown and Cornelius spot Jim, who's dressed, as usual, in white.

(Notice how Conrad emphasizes the symbolic color contrast
between the "immaculate" Jim and the "sun-blackened" Brown.)
When at last the two come face-to-face, their antagonism is
immediate. Brown recognizes that Jim isn't the kind of man who
would team up with him, and his crushed expectations make him
all the more bitter.

Nevertheless, Brown must deal with Jim, and he does it cleverly.

He admits that he and his men are trapped like rats. But, he
adds threateningly, "even a trapped rat can give a bite." His
men can still inflict some heavy damage on the village. "Not if
you don't go near the trap," Jim replies, "till the rat is
dead." Brown's men are surrounded, and the villagers can simply
let them starve.

Jim, it would seem, has all the advantages. But Brown is an

instinctive psychologist; he manages, almost unconsciously, to
locate Jim's weak spot and then go for it. When Jim asks him
what made him come to Patusan, Brown snaps, "Hunger. And what
made you?"--an answer that causes Jim to start and blush. Brown
assumes that everybody's as depraved as he is (that's how he
pictured Jim in Chapter Forty), so naturally he figures that any
European in remote Patusan must be running from a shady past.

"I am not a coward," Brown insists. "Don't you be one." He's

arguing (dubiously) that Jim would be cowardly to let his men
starve, but once again he's touching a sore spot. (Later he
tells Marlow with some pride, "I knew what to say.") When Jim
retorts that Brown doesn't deserve a better fate, Brown turns
the judgment around: "And what do you deserve," he shouts.
"And what did you come for?" Lamenting that he and his men are
all in the same boat, Brown declares that he's "not the sort to
jump out of trouble" and leave them in the lurch. Quite
accidentally, he's hit on the perfect figure of speech to freeze
Jim: the image of a man jumping out of a boat.

Brown's strategy is working. Jim has started to feel less sure

of his superiority. Curious now to compare their pasts, he asks
what crimes Brown has committed. Brown avoids specifics, which
would quickly reveal how much more malicious than Jim's his
misdeeds have been. But he does make an effective admission, "I
am here because I was afraid once in my life." Afraid of prison,
he means, but again he's touched on the very reason Jim is in
Patusan.

No wonder Jim is inclined toward leniency. Do not "judge men

harshly or hastily," his father's letter said (Chapter
Thirty-six). Jim felt, during the Patna inquiry, that his
judges were too harsh and too hasty, and for the same reason:
because he was afraid once in his life.

NOTE: THE BUTTERFLY IMAGE. Brown tells Jim accusingly, "you

talk as if you were one of those people that should have wings
so as to go about without touching the dirty earth." His jibe
explicitly recalls Stein's image, in Chapter Twenty, of the
"magnificent butterfly" on its "little heap of dirt." But it
also captures Jim's limitations. He doesn't have wings, he
can't live the perfectly spotless life, above the "dirt" of
compromising facts. But he can still excel. As Stein observed
(Chapter Twenty): "Man is amazing, but he is not a
masterpiece." For all the flaws that keep him from being a
masterpiece, Jim is still amazing.

Marlow closes the chapter with a reminiscence of Brown on his

deathbed. Even relishing his triumph over Jim, the dying Brown
is fairly pathetic. Marlow recalls a story he heard about Brown
weeping over the corpse of a woman he'd run away with. These
views show the human, vulnerable side of Brown, but even at his
most vulnerable he's still disgusting--a beetle to Jim's
butterfly.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Brown's conversation with Jim continues, Brown demonstrating his

"satanic gift of finding out the best and the weakest spot" in
his opponent. Brown tries to excuse his crew as suffering men
down on their luck. He lies (not very convincingly) that they
came to Patusan in order to beg, not to plunder. Throughout, he
keeps pressing "a sickening suggestion of common guilt" as he
tries to convince Jim that they're somehow alike. Yes, there
have been casualties in the village, but doesn't Jim understand
that when it "came to saving one's life in the dark, one didn't
care who else went--three, thirty, three hundred people"? Jim,
of course, remembers the 800 pilgrims aboard the Patna. Faced
with such awful reminders of his guilt, the ordinarily all-white
Jim looks "black as thunder."

Brown is such an expert at manipulating others that he even

manages to set the terms for his departure. He absolutely
refuses to surrender his men's weapons. Jim, cowed, accepts his
refusal, and leaves him promising either "a clear road" out of
Patusan, "or else a clear fight"--no starving them out. It's
just what Brown had hoped for.

Once Jim leaves, Cornelius appears to scold Brown for failing to

shoot him. He's helpless, though, to do anything more than
complain. When Cornelius finally leaves his "new friends" he is
sulking with disappointment.

Jim goes directly to confer with Doramin. What they say isn't
reported, but Jim apparently gets the old man's approval for the
course he's formulated. Tamb' Itam is hoping he'll decide to
fight. "What was it but the taking of another hill?" he asked
Marlow later, referring to Jim's triumph over Sherif Ali. But
other villagers, fearing bloodshed, just want to see the white
invaders leave.

Jim calls a meeting to present his plan. He's decided that the
invaders should be allowed to leave in peace. For the first
time since he's risen to his position as leader, Jim faces
severe opposition. But he's arguing the course that he thinks
is best for the village--the only course that will prevent
casualties. Jim reminds the assembled people of the courage
he's shown, and of his love for them. And he makes the same
promise he had made before the assault on Sherif Ali: "He was
ready to answer with his life for any harm that should come to
them if the white men with beards were allowed to retire.

NOTE: JIM'S DECISION. Readers strongly disagree about Jim's

decision to let Brown leave. The way you evaluate Jim's motives
here will be crucial to how you interpret the novel overall. Is
Jim's behavior at this juncture related, somehow, to his
behavior on the Patna? Or is he acting differently now?

There are, generally speaking, two schools of interpretation.

One school condemns Jim for not taking more vigorous action,
pointing to the way he was similarly immobilized on the fateful
night when the Patna was damaged. Faced with a sudden crisis
then, you may recall, different plans of action occurred to him,
but he failed to carry out any of them. Various pieces of
evidence support this view. The similarity between the names
Patna and "Patusan" suggests that the second part of Jim's adult
life is in some sense a repeat of the first part. The ease with
which Brown convinces Jim of their common guilt doesn't speak
well of Jim, either. Nor does the extent to which Jim accepts
Brown's sentimental self-justification: "They were erring men
whom suffering had made blind to right and wrong." And then
there are the foreboding words at the end of Chapter Seventeen:
"A clean slate, did he say? As if the initial word of each our
destiny were not graven in imperishable characters upon the face
of a rock!" (See the Note to that chapter.) These words imply a
fatalism of character: we are who we are, and we can't stop
being who we are. If Jim jumped off the Patna once, they seem
to say, then he'll keep repeating that mistake, in some form or
other, as long as he lives.

The other school takes a more lenient view of Jim. True, he may
be foolish to trust Brown at all. But there are excellent
reasons for letting Brown go without a fight. The invaders have
already inflicted several casualties on the village; a battle
would inevitably lead to many more. At least they've been
prevented from plundering, and there's scant danger they'll
return. Jim has already demonstrated his general willingness to
forgive, as well as his distaste for bloodshed. When Sherif Ali
sent four assassins to kill him, Jim released three of them
unharmed (Chapter Thirty-two). He shot the fourth (Chapter
Thirty-one) only because the man was rushing at him with a
dagger. Jim's first thought is for the people's well-being;
he's willing to put their safety above punishing the invaders,
which a strict rendering of justice might call for.

Conrad remains carefully neutral, presenting the facts via

Marlow, but stopping short of any final judgment. That he
leaves to you.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

The villagers are thunderstruck by Jim's decision. Many of

them, clearly, want to fight. But, one by one, they assent to
his judgment. When, somewhat later, he has a few minutes alone
with Jewel, she asks him how bad Brown's men really are. Jim's
reply shows either how naive he still is, or how far Brown has
duped him into sharing his guilt: "Men act badly sometimes
without being much worse than others." The statement may be true
of Jim, but Brown and his crew really are "much worse than
others."

The village prepares for the invaders' departure. The Rajah

flees; Jim's men temporarily take over his stockade. Kassim,
having been embarrassed in his diplomacy, does what he can to
ingratiate himself and make amends with the villagers. Jim
spends a sleepless night, while the faithful Tamb' Itam keeps an
eye on him.

Finally Jim sends Tamb' Itam off on a mission. He's to find

Dain Waris and his men, who are still downstream guarding the
river, and instruct them to let the white invaders pass.
Because the message is such an important one, Tamb' Itam asks
for a token to verify that it comes from Jim. (Actually, since
Tamb' Itam is so well-known, the token is mainly a formality.)
Jim gives him Stein's silver ring, the ring that was originally
a gift to Stein from Doramin.

In the invaders' camp, the men are preparing to leave. Brown

has received a note from Jim, via Cornelius, promising him a
clear road out. Cornelius has decided to stay around to goad
Brown for not killing Jim. Brown is already furious enough at
losing his plunder. But Cornelius hasn't given up some hope of
causing mischief. He tells Brown about Dain Waris and his crew,
camped down-river, and reminds him that it was Dain Waris who
led the initial, humiliating attack on the invaders. He also
tells him about an alternate river route that would take them
behind Dain Waris' camp.

Finally Brown takes the bait and lets Cornelius lead them to the
back route. (Cornelius' familiarity with the river is
particularly useful in the dense morning fog that's settled over
Patusan.) As they pass the stockade Jim calls out, with
remarkable good-nature, that if they're willing to wait for a
day he'll send down food. Jim really is an innocent; he has no
inkling of the depths of malice in a man like Brown.
^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

Tamb' Itam arrives at Dain Waris' camp and delivers Jim's

message, handing over the ring as he does so. Dain Waris toys
with the ring and slips it on as he listens to the report. Then
he dismisses Tamb' Itam to get food and rest, The men at the
camp prepare to return to the village that afternoon.

Cornelius, meanwhile, has led Brown's long-boat into the river

channel in back of the camp. Brown promises his men revenge,
and they disembark with loaded guns, hiding themselves at the
edge of the forest in full view of the Bugis encampment. At a
signal from Brown, they fire. A number of Dain Waris' men are
hit. Tamb' Itam, realizing at once what's happened, falls to
the ground, feigning death. But Dain Waris rushes to the
open-shore--just in time to get a bullet in the forehead on the
second volley. One more volley and Brown's crew flees, leaving
the Bugis camp in total panic.

But Cornelius has been stranded at the camp. He'd talked Brown
into bringing a canoe for his escape, but in the rush to get
away Brown's men have forgotten to untie it. Cornelius,
panicked himself, tries to escape in one of the Bugis canoes.
But Tamb' Itam spots him and quickly comprehends his role in the
massacre. He stabs the old villain to death before speeding
back to the village with the terrible news.

NOTE: A WORLD OF DISORDER, CONTINUED. (See the Note in Chapter

Thirty-three.) Conrad has depicted a senseless, cold-blooded
massacre; the killers have escaped punishment at the hands of
the villagers. Twice before (in Chapters Five and Thirty-three)
Marlow has confronted the vision of a cosmos that is morally
askew. But Conrad is unwilling to let that vision stand as his
final pronouncement. He retains some faith, however measured
and tentative, in a moral order. So he has Cornelius executed
at the hands of Tamb' Itam. Brown and his crew are more
problematic, but they don't get off free, either--at least, not
all of them. Marlow supplies a rather vague report that three
members of the crew are found dying of thirst in a long-boat
somewhere in the Indian Ocean. Three others, reportedly, have
already died, and two of the survivors die shortly after their
rescue. The third survivor is Brown, who of course has to keep
breathing long enough for Marlow to hear his story. But Brown
at least dies a ghastly death (if that's justice)--though to the
bitter end he gets huge satisfaction remembering how he tricked
Jim. There's no information on what became of the rest of his
crew.

Thus, Conrad's final vision is neither totally bleak nor

particularly comforting. Certainly he has less faith in a moral
order than earlier artists who believed in a just God. But he's
not convinced that the universe is morally chaotic, either. He
asks, but doesn't answer, How much of the order we do perceive
is arbitrary? How much do we invent for our own reassurance?
Is the standard of conduct "fixed" in the sense of "stable"? or
is it merely "fixed" by our general agreement to adhere to a
certain code of behavior?
^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

Tamb' Itam, paddling furiously, manages to reach the village

before any of the other witnesses. He meets Jewel and discloses
the terrible news; she immediately orders the gates shut. Both
of them realize that Doramin will want revenge, and their
thoughts turn to defense.

But when Tamb' Itam wakes Jim to deliver the news, his master's
reaction is very different. At first, Jim is very much the
leader, ordering Tamb' Itam to ready a fleet of boats to chase
the outlaws. Tamb' Itam gently explains that he can't: The
people have turned to revenge, and it's no longer safe for Jim's
servant to go out among them.

Jim quickly understands how profoundly his position has changed.

Just as a single error of action made European civilization an
unsuitable home for him, a single error of judgment has ruined
his life in Patusan. For the second time in his life, people
have reason to regret having trusted their lives to him. Marlow
comments, "I believe that in that very moment he had decided to
defy the disaster in the only way it occurred to him such a
disaster could be defied": that is, by facing it directly
rather than running. (His readiness to face Doramin is not
unlike his willingness to face the court of inquiry after the
Patna incident.) Notice that Marlow says "the only way it
occurred to him." Another man might be able to act differently,
defending himself or planning an escape in good conscience. But
Jim sees no alternative other than to face death at the hands of
Doramin. "The dark powers should not rob him twice of his
peace." He's run from death once, on the Patna, and it was the
greatest mistake of his life. He won't run away now. And he
refuses to fight, insisting that there's nothing to fight about.
Doramin, in his view, isn't his enemy. Besides, he can't
tolerate the thought of more bloodshed. It's at this juncture
that he tries to write something, producing the inarticulate
note that Marlow includes in his packet to the privileged man
(Chapter Thirty-six).

In the Bugis quarter, Doramin and his wife are grieving over the
corpse of their only son, which has been returned to the
village. As they stare mournfully at it, a bystander removes
the silver ring--Stein's ring, which Jim had given Tamb' Itam as
a token. On seeing it, Doramin roars with "pain and fury" at
this evidence of Jim's complicity in Dain Waris' death.

NOTE: DORAMIN'S RAGE. There is a certain amount of

condescension, and perhaps racism, in this portrait of the
bereaved Doramin. You can easily see why Jim isn't entirely to
blame for Dain Waris' death. Though Doramin's fury is
understandable as a product of his grief, it's hard to believe
that the wise old man would so readily attribute his son's death
to Jim's treachery. In fact, blame for the death rests partly
on Doramin's own shoulders. If he had agreed to an assault on
the invaders in the first place instead of holding off as he did
in order to protect his son (Chapter Thirty-nine), Brown and his
men wouldn't have lived to stage their sneak attack. Moreover,
Jim is Doramin's (and the Bugis') most important ally against
the Rajah; the people's well-being depends largely on Jim's
continued authority. In destroying Jim, Doramin is destroying
the very protections Jim has established, the order that ensures
safety to every family. The only way to explain Doramin's
irrational behavior is by dismissing him as an ignorant Malay
chieftain--a racist view that would have been commonplace among
the British imperialists of Marlow's day. Unfortunately, Conrad
doesn't seem to rise above this view. Marlow's praise of Dain
Waris for his "European mind" (Chapter Twenty-six) relegates the
rest of the Patusan Malays--including Doramin--to a lower
level.

NOTE: JEWEL'S ANGER. Jim's departure from Jewel is a

distressing scene. She accuses him of abandoning her just as
she feared, just as her father had abandoned her mother. The
meaning of her exchange with Marlow (Chapter Thirty-three) now
becomes clear. She had expressed her anxiety that something in
Jim was stronger than his love for her. That something was his
guilt. It wasn't clear then how his love and his guilt might
conflict, but they're conflicting now, and Jim's guilt is
stronger. If he were to act solely out of love, he would try to
stay with Jewel, through either battle or flight. But Jim has
lived under the stigma of cowardice, and what's most important
to him is proving he's not afraid of death--even if that means
going to face an all-but-certain death at the hands of Doramin.
This is what Marlow means by his reference to Jim's "superb
egoism." Jim ultimately thinks of neither Jewel nor anybody
else--only his own conscience, his own stained honor. When he
tells Jewel, "Nothing can touch me," it's not because he has any
illusions about being safe from death. As long as he acts in a
way that demonstrates he's not afraid of death, he'll be
morally--if not physically--invulnerable. No one can call him a
coward. Is this courage or egotism?

But Jewel doesn't understand his guilt. In fact, she doesn't

believe he could really be guilty. When Marlow told her that
Jim was "not good enough" for the world (Chapter Thirty-three),
her reply was, "You lie!" Jewel knows only that she's being
abandoned as her mother was abandoned--that something is more
important to Jim than she is--and she refuses to forgive him.

Tamb' Itam accompanies Jim to Doramin's quarter. The courtyard

is crowded with armed Bugis and other villagers. Many are
surprised that Jim has come. Doramin sits with the silver ring
and the big pair of pistols, Stein's gift, on his lap. His wife
is crouched at the head of their son's body.

Jim repeats the pledge he made at the end of Chapter Forty-two:

He accepts responsibility for the deaths. "Upon my head," as he
puts it. Doramin rises with the help of his retainers and the
silver ring, Jim's token, falls from his lap and rolls against
Jim's foot. Taking Jim at his word (which, technically, is his
right), he raises one of the pistols and shoots him through the
chest. Jim looks left and right at the crowd with "a proud and
unflinching glance" before he falls dead.
Marlow adds that Jim "passes away under a cloud" (a clouded
reputation, in the eyes of the wide world and of Patusan),
"inscrutable at heart" (a lament Marlow has made from the
beginning), "forgotten" (by most of the world that condemned
him), "unforgiven" (by those few who do remember, especially
Jewel), "and excessively romantic." Jim's romantic striving is
nowhere more evident than in his last act--an attempt to live up
to an ideal of himself even at the cost of his life. Employing
a recurring image (it makes its first appearance in Chapter
Twenty-four), Marlow wonders whether Jim hadn't at last "beheld
the face of that opportunity which, like an Eastern bride, had
come veiled to his side." What could that opportunity possibly
have been? If someone stated that it was the opportunity to
face death with "a proud and unflinching glance," what would
your reaction be?

The novel ends on a decidedly melancholy note. Jewel is still

at Stein's home, silent and stunned with grief. As for Stein
himself--probably the figure in the novel whom Marlow most
admire--he's aged greatly. Stein often hints that he's
preparing for death, "while he waves his hand sadly at his
butterflies"--a last symbolic reminder of what Jim aspired to,
and couldn't be: perfect.

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: GLOSSARY

ABSIT OMEN Proverbial Latin saying: may there be no ill

omens.

BALLY British schoolboy slang for "damn," originally a euphemism

for "bloody."

BETEL, BETEL-NUT Seed of the betel palm, chewed by many

Southeast Asians.

BOAT-CHOCK Cradle on which a ship's boat rests on deck.

BRIGANTINE Kind of two-masted sailing ship.

BUGIS Malay people from the island of Celebes and nearby

islands.

BULKHEAD Upright partition separating one part of a ship from

another.

CAMPONG Malay village or hamlet.

DAIN Bugis title of respect.

DAVIT One of the small projecting cranes used for raising and
lowering a ship's boats.

DRILL Strong, durable cotton fabric.

FOREPEAK Part of a ship below the deck and toward the front.

GHARRY Kind of horse-drawn cab.

GHARRY-WALLAH Driver of a gharry.

GUANO Sea bird manure, used as fertilizer.

GUNWALE Upper edge of a boat's side.

HAWSER Cable or rope used to moor or tow a ship.

HELM Ship's steering mechanism.

KRISS Malay dagger.

LASCAR East Indian sailor.

LONG-BOAT Longest boat carried on a sailing ship.

MALACCA Port on the Malay Peninsula, about 125 miles north of

Singapore.

NAKHODA Bugis merchant class, or a member of that class.

NAUTICAL ASSESSOR Person with marine expertise, appointed to

assist a judge.

PANGLIMA Malay chief.

PUNKAH Kind of Indian fan, consisting of a large palm leaf or

canvas strip stretched over a frame suspended from the ceiling,
and operated by a servant.

SCHOONER Kind of ship with two or more masts.

SERANG Officer of an East Indian ship's crew.

SHERIF Muslim title indicating descent from Muhammad.

SHIP-CHANDLER Supplier of provisions and supplies to ships.

SPAR Any of the poles on a ship for supporting or extending the

sails.

THWART Plank extending across a boat and used as a seat.

TIFFIN Anglo-Indian word for lunch.

TILLER Bar or lever used to turn a boat's rudder.

TUAN Malay title of respect (see the Note to Chapter One).

TUNKU Malay word meaning "my lord."

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: GERMAN WORDS AND EXPRESSIONS

ACH! Oh!

BLEIBT GANZ RUHIG Stays very still.

EWIG Always.

EWIGKEIT Eternity.

GELUNGEN Successful.

GEWISS Certainly.

JA Yes.

NICHT WA[H]R? Isn't that so?

SCHWEIN Pig.

SCHON Good, fine.

SEHEN SIE You see.

SO HALT' ICH'S ENDLICH DENN IN MEINEN HANDEN, / UND NENN' ES IN

GEWISSEM SINNE MEIN. "So I finally hold it in my hands, / and
call it, in a certain sense, mine" (from Goethe's play Torquato
Tasso, Act I, Scene iii).

VERFLUCHTE Cursed, damned.

WIE? WAS? GOTT IM HIMMEL! How? What? God in heaven!

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: ON CONRAD'S VIEW OF JIM

The crux of it all is that at the end we ask what precisely

Conrad's intentions were--did he approve of Jim or did he not?
And there is no answer to that question--none but the simple,
all-sufficing one, that he strove "to make us see." We do see
Jim as Conrad, a man of vision, saw him, and we are left with
that spectacle to make what we can of it for ourselves.

-Edward Crankshaw, Joseph Conrad:

Some Aspects of the Art of the Novel, 1936

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: ON JIM'S DENIAL

In contrast with the captain of [Conrad's story] "The Secret

Sharer," Jim repudiates the other-self that has been revealed to
him; at no time does he consciously acknowledge that it was
himself who jumped from the Patna--it was only his body that had
jumped; and his career thenceforth is an attempt to prove before
men that the gross fact of the jump belied his identity.

-Dorothy Van Ghent, The English Novel:

Form and Function, 1953

^^^^^^^^^^
LORD JIM: JIM AND BROWN
Dramatically as well as theoretically, Lord Jim is a story of
sympathies, projections, empathies... and loyalties. The
central relationship is that of Marlow and Jim. We can see why
Jim needs Marlow, as an "ally, a helper, an accomplice." He
cannot believe in himself unless he has found another to do so.
And he needs a judge, witness, and advocate in the solitude of
his battle with himself. All this is evident. But why does
Marlow go so far out of his way, very far really, to help Jim?
He speaks of the fellowship of the craft, of being his very
young brother's keeper, of loyalty to "one of us," of mere
curiosity, of a moral need to explore and test a standard of
conduct. And we may say with much truth that this is a novel of
a moving and enduring friendship between an older and a younger
man. But Marlow... acknowledges a more intimate or more
selfish alliance. He is loyal to Jim as one must be to another
or potential self, to the criminally weak self that may still
exist....

Marlow is not fatally paralyzed or immobilized by this young

"double." But Big Brierly is.... Marlow sees, in retrospect,
that "at bottom Poor Brierly must have been thinking of himself"
when he wanted Jim to clear out. He had recognized in Jim an
unsuspected potential self; he had looked into himself for the
first time.... But the episode's chief function is to prepare
us to understand (or at least accept) Jim's paralyzed
identification with Gentleman Brown and suicidal refusal to
fight him; and to prepare us, also, for the deliberateness of
Jim's march up to Doramin.

-Albert J. Guerard,

Conrad the Novelist, 1958

ON TRUTH vs. FACTS

The horizons Jim dreamed of are unattainable, the heroic dreams

he imagined to himself he cannot realize in action, life
consecrated to an ideal of conduct cannot be lived, not only
because of the ungovernable hostility of baser men but also
because of the inexpugnable weaknesses in the ideal itself. But
the feelings that lie at the root of all these aspirations and
ideals--you cannot give the lie to those. Such would seem to be
Marlow's point.

And it is because of the unflagging persistence of those

feelings, their determination to operate at the highest
attainable level, that both Marlow and Stein are inclined to
speak of the "truth" of Jim's later life.

he terrible unavoidable truth about Jim is that "he is not good

enough"--the worst truth to Conrad is that "nobody, nobody is
good enough." Jim cannot triumph over the ugly facts (a key word
in the novel) though he spends his time trying to: he cannot
"lay the ghost" of the ugly fact that he himself embodies and
must carry with him wherever he goes.... But these facts are
true--which is why truth is always referred to as "painful" or
"sinister" in the later Conrad. Jim, despite the Platonic halo
and the author's efforts to shore him up poetically, is not
finally true. Or not true enough for the relentlessly
penetrating eye of Conrad. The realists have no ideals--thus
their lives are ugly. But the idealist has no grip on reality:
he cannot live properly at all. Lord Jim is a prelude to
profound pessimism.

-Tony Tanner, "Butterflies and Beetles-

Conrad's Two Truths," 1963

THE END