Lord Jim (Penguin Classics)

Lord Jim is an early harbinger of the modern novel. With perspectives and chronologies that take a while to settle, it is not an easy read. But do persist. The reward is well worth it: not only for the rich characters but the human insight that is quintessentially Conrad. Enjoy!

Conrad describes a scene, a feeling, a circumstance like no other. The story is a tale of internal struggle that might have been considered mediocre but for the unique style of Conrad's English. He is to be studied by any student of English literature.

This is an excellent reproduction of this marvelous classic. The issues in this book are ones each of us should ponder often. How do I deal with my failings? How do I create the image of who I am? What price true honesty?

The fact that this is another book 'narrated' by Malone makes the book. I was first introduced to the master storyteller in Heart of Darkness. I was verry happy to encounter Conrads perspective through him again.

Review is for this particular edition, not the book. The book I purchased, on the Kindle, was labelled as 'illustrated' and 'formatted for e-readers'. The illustrations are just random copies of paintings from the 1800s that have nothing at all to do with the story. This in itself wouldn't bother me, but the book has ads at the beginning of every chapter. That is too much. I didn't pay for this book so that I could look at ads from 'Buck Books' whenever I reached the beginning of a chapter. This edition should be pulled from the store and the purchase price refunded to those of us unlucky enough to have fallen for the trick. Apparently there is not even a basic perusal of books before the get to be posted for sale on the kindle store - one of these ads appears at the beginning of chapter 1!

A wonderful story. However the book binding started falling apart during the reading, and it was such a problem I took out my library's copy to finish the book. So I recommend being a bit skeptical about the described book condition when purchasing.

From the vantage point of the 21st century, I often wonder about the life of a sailor in the 2nd half of the 19th century, when ports of call existed on every continent, and commercial trade conventions were long established, and far-off exotic locales were familiar places to the peripatetic seaman. How different is the local culture and life of the great seaports than those land locked communities in the heartlands, far from either river or railroad. How many wandering storytellers come to such communities with stories of extreme duress and moral complexity? What do such isolated communities know and understand of the complicated, difficult, and often imperfect ethical conundrums that confront the worldly wise and often, world weary in their wanderings across the seas.

Lord Jim is a fascinating, complex psychological character study of someone who bore on his back the burden of absolute, utter disgrace, yet who longed for an opportunity to demonstrate, at least to himself, if no one else, that his one great moral failure should not define the whole of his character. And thus he remained true to himself, to the bitter end. When all his colleagues ran off to avoid standing up and being held accountable, exposed to public scrutiny, public contempt, and public ridicule, Jim alone answered for his actions to the high maritime court. And when he had made that ill-fated bargain with a human devil incarnate, Gentleman Brown, that turned out SO badly, once again, he alone, stood up before the high judge and accepted his responsibility, and the final, inevitable decree. He could have fled, but instead, like Socrates, he saw nothing to flee to. He had acted thusly, he accepted his responsibility, and he held himself accountable to others whom had placed their faith and trust in him.

This is NOT a novel about cowardice! It is much more complex than that. Each of us, in the screenplay's of our own lives, tends to write ourselves as the heroic protagonist who always wears the white hat, and we always justify, in one way our another, the actions we take and the decisions we make. But how many of us are truly tested--in the crucible--where the urge and impulse must be weighed against the notion of obligation and duty, and the kind of decision that judges on a high court might make, after hearing all the evidence, after taking the time for proper deliberation--is demanded in the twinkling of an eye. Which of us could always make the right decision, every time, when confronted with such desperate situations--and examining our own characters honestly--where does that leave each one of us. Conrad argues that it should lead us like Marlowe, who has seen much of the world, and is willing to see the good in others who were tried in the balance and found wanting. Marlowe believes in the possibility of redemption, of growth and of hope, and it is his faith alone that finally persuades Jim that his life may yet have some meaning--that he may yet transform his one great failure into a kind of transcendent moral victory. And--alas, it is Jim's striving for moral perfection that, in the end, is his own undoing. For not every one of us is deserving of the kind of faith that Marlowe had in Jim. Faith and trust in a true psychpath like Gentleman Brown would be a bad bet every time. It's like the folklore of the frog and the scorpion--in the end, the scorpion will sting the frog, every time, because it is his nature. But Jim had known desperation, and he knew he had no right to claim any moral high ground, having failed once, himself, and so, he was willing to trust Brown, to take him at his word, as a gentleman. All his companions knew Brown for what he was--but Jim was blind to it--he saw himself in Brown, and was moved to mercy because he himself had been the object of Marlowe's mercy. This is complex stuff! And Conrad wants you to think hard, and seriously about it, for, as Immanuel Kant has written, the only absolute is the Moral Imperative. But the certainty of Moral absolutes is always fleeting--we are ALWAYS crucified on the poles of two competing perspectives-two equally valid and totally opposing propositions--and the real challenge to courage is to chose one, and let it be on YOUR head.

So, Jim's failure as a crew member of the ill fated Patna was NOT cowardice--it was simply going along with the others. It was herd behavior. We find this principle expressed in the New Testament in the form of: "I have not come to bring peace but a sword! For I have come to set a man against his father... And one's foes will be members of one's own household." It was Jim's going along with the rest of the crew in their abdication of their obligations that was his failure--the crew knew that he did not feel as they--they talked openly of throwing him out of the lifeboat--he stayed awake all night gripping the tiller as a club lest they try it. No, Jim's failure on the Patna was in not saying NO! to the rest of the crew, and staying behind, living up to the duties, and the responsibilities he had agreed to undertake when he signed on. By blindly following the leadership of the herd, he betrayed himself, the Pilgrims, the Ship owners, indeed, all of the civilized world.

This book is easily misunderstood if you do not take the time to consider what Conrad is saying, carefully. Any of us is capable of moral failure or corruption, given the right circumstances. And he shows us how even the motivation to never make another mistake of that sort can itself lead to a fatal weakness. In this, he has identified the original Catch-22 long before Joseph Heller. Conrad is one of the deepest, and most profound writers in western literature, and he requires his reader to work a little; but the investment is worth it. The candle is worth the game.

“Time had passed indeed: it had overtaken him and gone ahead. It had left him hopelessly behind with a few poor gifts: the iron-grey hair, the heavy fatigue of the tanned face, two scars, a pair of tarnished shoulder-straps; one of those steady, reliable men who are the raw material of great reputations, one of those uncounted lives that are buried without drums and trumpets under the foundations of monumental successes.”

Just wow. With lines like that, who can afford not to read “Lord Jim”? And the novel is full of them – well written and holding closely to the plot without wandering off only to come back thirty pages later after the reader is already left.

Of course that quote was not talking about Jim. How could it be?

Lord Jim is the story about one man’s bad decision at a moment of fear – and his attempt to live down that decision. At the end (spoiler alert) he atones for his actions in that most final of ways; he surrenders his life. Fear – have you ever been afraid? Panic, white and choking, shortness of breath and cold sweat? We never know what we will do in that moment of panic – oh we like to pretend we do; full of bravado and bluster we tell of our courage under stress. But we all know that there’s at least the possibility that we will panic, that we will flee, that we will humiliate ourselves. That the “muscle memory” is not well formed enough to guarantee the appropriate response.

Jim’s bad decision was to jump ship – literally; he was an officer and officers are supposed to go down with the ship. To put the charges before themselves. To surrender to the sea – that’s the covenant. But caught up in the moment, thinking the ship was going down he jumps into the dingy. Except the ship didn’t go down. Oh humiliation – to be tried for dereliction of duty; the mockery of others as stories are told of the ship un-manned found drifting in the sea; the officers all having fled. Wandering the world, looking for a place where the story of his humiliation was not on everyone’s lips Jim ends up in an out of the way atoll in the middle of the pacific. The end of the world – the only white man. There he finds respite for a time; until again the grasping reach of “progress” finds him in the form of another fight and he has a choice. Two times, to run or to stay and fight. The first time he jumped. What will he do the second?

Read this book; for it is one of the greats for a reason.

Conrad’s lengthy psychological novel, a classic for over a century, requires patient attentiveness on the part of readers. There is a curious and sometimes confusing interplay of narrators; the story opens with an omniscient narrator who introduces both the setting and the controversial protagonist. But most of the book is narrated by Captain Marlowe, who first discovers Jim in a courtroom packed for a Maritime Inquiry. There are reports by other characters as well, plus a few documents thrown into the literary vortex; thus it is not plainly clear which “I” is speaking or which “He” the speaker means.

Divided into two unequal sections the novel opens with Jim, first mate aboard the aging Patna--gazing into calm waters on a moonlight night. Amusing himself with hypothetical dreams of heroic valor the Englishman flatters his ego by winning the hearts of men with his cool yet commanding actions. The second, longer part is called “the Patusan section,” where he has established himself as a virile white lord among the natives near the Java Sea. Alas, his idyllic existence with a devoted man servant and a passionate native girl are doomed to a violent and disastrous end.

Conrad remains proudly aloof by withholding all the details of the incident which precipitates the near wreck of the ship which is bearing hundreds of Moslem pilgrims—and incidentally spells maritime disaster for the reputation of several of her officers. Haunted by his public shame for the crime of cowardice (abandoning a doomed ship) Jim seeks escape from white man’s civilization and unforgiving memory by taking up residence in a remote river village. Under forgiving tropical skies he carves out a renewed sense of self-worth by resolving some native conflicts. Is he finally free of that shameful moment of dereliction of duty? Is it enough to satisfy his skulking fate that he deeply cares for the welfare of his “people”, who address him as “tuan” or Lord?

The Penguin edition is supplemented by extensive notes—whose overall impression reveals Conrad’s familiarity with maritime scandal. Perhaps this observation highlights not his lack of imagination--but rather his eclectic knowledge of South Sea lore. Can honor lost in one realm be redeemed in another? In LORD JIM Conrad depicts the gradual sunset of Imperialism, with its paternalistic view of native cultures. Jim alone senses that only in this remote village can he reclaim forgiveness and lost social honor. But at what price?

Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jim was originally published as a serial in Blackwood’s Magazine, running from 1899 to 1900. Jim (no last name given), the son of an English parson, grows up with romantic notions of life as a sailor. When he comes of age, he enthusiastically enters the trade and eventually ends up in Southeast Asia. Jim signs on as first mate of the Patna, a ship overloaded with Muslim passengers bound for Mecca. One night the ship strikes something and begins to take on water. Cut to a month later at a magistrate’s court: an inquiry is being held, and Jim is the accused. That fateful night at sea, Jim and the rest of the Patna crew abandoned the ship, leaving the passengers on board the damaged vessel. While his shipmates flee from the inquest, Jim faces up to his punishment, and takes his medicine like a man. He is stripped of his seaman’s status in public disgrace.

A spectator at the trial, Marlow, strikes up a friendship with Jim and strives to find him a position in which he can start his life anew. Most of the novel is narrated by Marlow, as if speaking to a roomful of listeners. Jim and Marlow have long conversations about the shame and regret brought on by Jim’s cowardice. This shame and regret is painstakingly dissected, analyzed, and dwelled upon for over half the book. Thankfully, the story eventually picks up as Jim seemingly finds his place in the world and is given a shot at redemption.

The last several chapters of Lord Jim actually amount to a pretty good book. The trouble is the 37 chapters of digressions and verbosity that you have to wade through to get there. I’m familiar enough with Conrad to know that, despite the exotic locale, you’re not going to get a typical South Seas adventure from him. Nevertheless, seeing as how this book is hailed as one of his great masterpieces, I was hoping for at least a satisfying plot. There may be one here, but unfortunately it’s buried under heaps of overdescription. It’s almost as if Conrad is describing a series of paintings rather than writing a novel. He frustratingly refuses to just tell you what happened, instead opting for confusion and obfuscation. When the story cuts to the inquiry, for example, you don’t know what happened on the Patna, and Conrad makes you wait three or four chapters before he gets around to telling you. The jumps in chronology and switching of narrators feels like ostentatious literary novelty. These techniques in no way enhance the realism or emotional power of the story. If you listen carefully, you can hear the snores of Marlow’s audience.

Based on the kind of literature I enjoy reading, I feel like I should like Conrad, but I always end up being disappointed by his books. I liked Victory a little better than this one, but not much. Those who prefer the straightforward storytelling of Melville or Stevenson won’t take kindly to Conrad’s ornate verbal carpet. One can’t help thinking that he would have made a great fireside storyteller if he didn’t approach every scene obliquely and overanalyze every emotion. He’s got the whole South Pacific as his canvas, but he’s stuck in one corner delineating a supporting character’s eyebrow in exquisite detail. This should have been an interesting, exciting, and moving novel, but instead it’s mostly just tedious. The ending is somewhat compelling, but not enough to redeem the novel as a whole. Lord Jim may have put me off Conrad for good.

We are donating our personal libraries to the New York City Library on York Avenue, which has an all volunteer bookstore in the basement, and which raises a million dollars a year for the library system. This soft cover book will sell for a dollar or two there, and every penny helps.

In fact, it might be marked even lower -- after all, similar copies sell on the store in this edition for a penny.

But, the book is so good, so beautifully written, that it is worth every penny. I envy the next owner.

Robert C. Ross
September 2018

" ...there are as many shipwrecks as there are men ..."

Imagine, for a moment, that it was Brown's sunken schooner which makes its way back to the beginning of the novel and becomes the wreckage that caves in the Patna's bulkhead ("as though the ship had steamed across a narrow belt of vibrating water and of humming air"), thus setting the events in motion all over again. This novel would then be a wholly contained circle of doomed fate and circumstance destined to play out the same way over and over, time after time. Perhaps this is why Conrad chose to not only describe Jim as "inscrutable" but also to tell the story through Marlow - a story within a story so that Jim, in essence, more easily becomes us ("one of us" and, truly, "any of us") and Marlow becomes a sort of God who dispassionately watches us folly.

The nested storytelling, the subtle wordplay, the idea that "three hundred miles beyond the end of telegraph cables and mail-boat lines, the haggard utilitarian lies of our civilization wither and die, to be replaced by pure exercises of imagination" creates an unreality that speaks to a truth of our own being better than if we were given an exact replica of Jim. Conrad gives us something infinitely better than an anatomically perfect recreation of a man who, for all the reasons and complexities that make a person a person, fails in his honor and shipwrecks his future - we get "the exact description of the form of a cloud" - a cloud in which we each see something different but is just simply a cloud - just simply us.

Ultimately, for me, the novel was about chances, specifically the chances that are missed in life; the missed chances we always remember and can never let go of and forgive ourselves for. And Jim could have easily asked for forgiveness, too - his father, a parson, seemed a very thin analogy with God himself, a God who will forgive if only you truly believe in him, but Jim couldn't even forgive himself for the missed chance and for how he ruined his life.

And I kept wondering about his father. Jim kept that letter all those years so you knew it pained him to turn his back on his family and even though he 'knew' he could never go back, he also knew that he didn't actually know that - he still held onto a sliver of hope, even if it was only a hopelessly romantic and boyishly nostalgic one.

I wonder if what Conrad was also trying to say is that man is always doomed? There really are no heroes in the novel, in fact the best man we come across, the most successful man, Captain Brierly, just up and decides one day to jump off his ship and drown himself. Did Brierly see his fate clearly to know that he too was doomed, like Jim? Or did he know that if push came to shove he would be just as cowardly as Jim and he couldn't face it, not like Jim could? And how come the biggest bastard in the novel, Captain Brown, is most able to act 'heroically'? Is Conrad trying to say that heroism is born only from selfishness? From wanting to fill one's belly?

While I don't know what Conrad actually thought, it seems clear to me that he felt it important to write an entire novel that makes you question the definition of morality, of honor, and of character. That's why Conrad created the 'character' of Jim because he could be any of us, he could be all of us, he represents every one of our individual failures and missed chances and misunderstandings. Jim is like the inner doll of a Russian nesting doll and each character in the novel is one doll larger until we get to the outer doll, us.

However, I'm still unsure of what I think the novel was all about. Conrad plays such a literary master game with us that by the end I feel like my head is spinning. The language is beautiful but nonspecific (as Conrad always writes), and the "point" is unclear and open to really any interpretation - I have more questions than answers, but I love that he got me thinking about so many ideas.

And this has been the most difficult review of a novel I've ever had to write because it would be like trying to recreate one of Steins perfect butterflies from far away based off of just the verbal description given to us through multiple sources handed out from the jungle 300 miles in and pieced together over a life time. I could spend my life getting caught up in this beautiful novel, constantly going around and around, like Jim, or like fate, or like all of mankind.

In the 'Author's Note' Joseph Conrad mentions the account of a friend about the comments made by a lady after having read 'Lord Jim'. She found the book morbid, he said, and Conrad wondered how she could 'have perceived anything morbid in the acute consciousness of lost honour'.

While this is the novel's central theme from which flows everything else - remorse, feelings of guilt and inadequacy, the longing for atonement -, Conrad makes use of it to explore concepts of idealism and the fragility of the human psyche in the face of unexpected exigencies and paints a vivid picture of the torments they may cause, in this case for the novel's protagonist, Jim.

So, is the tale of Jim's doomed trajectory after his watershed failure morbid, or is it romantic with its emphasis on honour and unfulfillable longings for ideals and purity? I find it interesting that Joseph Conrad thought it necessary to mention that anonymous quote in his opening notes to the book. Morbid? Romantic? Maybe the two sentiments are closer than one thinks in the face of unattainable ideals and the lifes lived out in their shadow.

The events and the riveting tale are set in exotic locales and it has been said that Jim becoming the 'Lord' of island natives has a very loose association with real life 19th century English adventurer James Brooke, the "White Raja of Sarawak".

Reading some of the other review, I noticed that this Conrad Classic is often cited as required reading in High Schools. To those who found the novel 'tedious, wordy, boring' or whatever other adjectives used to describe it, may I recommend reading it again a few decades later? Life experience and its accumulated toll will undoubtedly bring Jim's ordeal into much better perspective.

Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad delves into the anguished conscience of a junior officer who fails his own conscience when he deserts a sinking ship, filled with pilgrims to Mecca, though he does so following the lead of his utterly debased and incompetent captain. Jim relives the cowardice that undermine his self-image years before as a trainee officer when he shirked the menace of a looming tempest. own from grace and who is unable to come to terms with it. In the second part of the novel narrated by Conrad's frequent narrator, Marlowe, urges to redeem himself hoping against hope saying, perhaps lying to himself, that, 'I always thought that if a fellow could begin with a clean slate'.

Conrad makes it clear that Jim's cowardice is not exceptional; he would not have the reader condemn or despise him; even the captain of the abandoned Patna is not extraordinarily contemptible for his dereliction of duty; but he is despicable because he makes no effort to redeem himself. The court of inquiry that investigates the crew's desertion of the Patna effectively excuses the officers, simply advising Jim to lose himself amid the human flotsam around the ports of southeast Asia. Jim complies, ostracising himself for years, working as a chandler, until chance brings an opportunity for him to regain his dignity through sacrificing himself for Malay villagers preyed upon by pirates.

Marlow provides insights into Jim's conduct and character, telling the reader:'The time was coming when I should see him loved, trusted, admired, with a legend of strength and prowess forming round his name as though he had been the stuff of a hero.' Through Marlow, the reader also expects Jim to prove himself to be more than an ordinary man, one who would not only save himself from self-contempt, but who would provide an exemplar that others would look up, not only for his courage but also for his humility.'He had the gift of finding a special meaning in everything that happened to him.'

"Lord Jim" is worth reading many times, not only for its psychological depths concerning a man who hopes to be more than the world has a right to expect of him. It is also a book that unfolds a landscape combined with a seascape at the turn of the century when Asia and Europe were coming together in the Pacific Basin, and when greed and fear clashed with innovation and personal acts of sacrifice.

Like other reviewers I was introduced to this book at a young age. Although I was too young to understand much, it intrigued me then as it intrigues me now - this prototypical theme about one who leaves the numbing monotony of uninspired domestic life for the romanticism of going to sea and distant lands. Certainly, the romanticism of youth and then the subsequent disillusionment of experience, in this case a bitter twist of fate, was a subject of grave concern for Conrad, and that concern is sounded in the powerful language that comes out through the narrator Marlow. As Marlow relates, "There is a magnificent vagueness in the expectations that had driven each of us to sea, such a glorious indefiniteness, such a beautiful greed of adventures... in no other kind of life is the beginning all illusion - the disenchantment more swift - the subjugation more complete". Or this: "Yet you, too, in your time must have known the intensity of life, that light of glamour created in the shock of trifles, as amazing as the glow of sparks struck from a cold stone - and as short-lived, alas." Stein, the merchant and butterfly collector had an enigmatic answer to this romanticism: "in the destructive element submit."

Of interest here is the historical context within which this book was written. It appears as if an actual historical incident, the abandonment by the crew of the British ship Jeddah carrying pilgrims bound for Mecca in 1880, serves as a basis for the story. It was during a time when Great Britain had amassed a great overseas empire and had come to dominate the trade routes to the East; and also when racist attitudes abounded, supported by the science of the day. At one point, Marlow pauses in his narrative to wonder if all this enterprise into foreign lands could have arisen solely out of greed, and cannot come up with any other motives other than to benefit loved ones back home.

Jim's downfall has a great deal to do with the fringe characters that cross his path. None of the crew of the Patna seem to be anything but self-indulgent and self-serving; exactly the kind of people one would expect to run for their lives rather than face a responsibility for something larger than themselves. It was Jim's fate as a youth to suffer the inaction of being pulled along with these cowards. Marlow went out of his way to extend his sympathy to Jim, seeing in him a different sensibility, as "one of us". But then again, although it's not exactly clear - "obscured in mists" as Marlow would say, he had something in common with that crew. He seems to have had his head in the clouds, thinking about his own adventures rather than his duty to the passengers. Later, when he is banished to Patusan and becomes a revered figure to the natives there and is on his way to redeeming himself and finding love - at least in that one corner of the world - he crosses paths with two outcasts, the egomaniac pirate Gentleman Brown and the abject Cornelius. Then a twist of fate...

Lord Jim is a masterpiece, encompassing almost all that Conrad has ever written. Jim is a young seaman with an exagerated feeling for his own romantic courage. Yet this courage abandons him in the moment he can prove himself, when he and his fellow officer abandon a passanger ship on the sly, believing that it will sink. Yet the ship is rescued and Jim put to trial. His fellow officers all slink away rather than stand trial, while he is stripped of his rank.
He tries to flee his own notority, but in vain. Wherever he goes, soon somebody will arrive who knows him and that unfortunate incident. Until finally he escapes to a small Malayan kingdom, where no-one knows him. He becomes the benevolent de-facto ruler of the place. Until one day he commits an error of judgement. This time he faces the consequences of his error. Thus he dies.
Conrad leaves no doubt that Jim dies in vain, yet in peace with himself. Conrad does not deliver a final judgement on whether Jims romantic ideals are misguided or not. The book all in all is a great lamento for the lost age of romanticism. Thus the narrator Marlow does not hide his liking of the young man and his romantic desires, yet he does not shy away from also showing the loss and desolation Jim inflicts on others by his decision for sacrifice his life for his honour.
The reader is left with these conflicting emotions, there is no clean resolution to the book. And this is what makes it great.
Unlike others, I did not find this book to long or to dense. Rather the long descriptive passages give the book this slow pace which is so essential to the unfolding of this narrative.
Read this book and you will see the world with other eyes.

Lord Jim is Joseph Conrad's most popular novel and possibly his best, which truly says much. A dark tale of human frailty with profound psychological insight, revolutionary narrative techniques, and sublime prose, it is essential for fans of Conrad and classics generally.

The most immediate and lasting feature is probably the dense portrayal of the title character, one of literature's most memorable tragic heroes and most fascinating character studies. What makes him so engrossing is that he in many ways has great potential - he certainly has enough strength and determination to be a successful, even admirable leader - yet somehow embarks on a downward spiral leading to bleak death. He is the essence of Conrad's dark vision - average in many respects and extraordinary in some but burdened with a character flaw that leads to his demise. As in much of Conrad, there is a strong fatalistic streak. Jim never would have thought himself capable of the act that led to his ruin, others would have thought it equally impossible, and he is unable to understand it himself while regretting it bitterly - yet it happened. Conrad's real claim seems to be not that it was fated but that humans are inherently frail and that individual flaws will come out in even the most staunch given the right situation - which only the truly lucky avoid. It is easy to condemn Jim, but Conrad was never one to take an obvious moral route, depicting him with characteristically thought-provoking ambivalence. The narrator cannot deny his act's essential despicableness but sees that Jim still has much worth. One of Conrad's great artistic strengths is that he gives much food for proverbial thought but never sinks to the heavy-handedness so common in many other heavy writers and nearly always fatal. Jim is shown from several angles with astounding verisimilitude and piercing psychological perspicuity, but it is up to us to judge him and all he stands for - if we can. Even the harshest cannot deny his essential humanity, which is what makes him so compelling; loathsome as he conventionally is, we recognize the tempestuous darkness beneath his impressive exterior because we have seen it in ourselves. Conrad made a career out of exposing this darkness, and this is a prime example.

The ground-breaking and highly influential narrative structure is nearly as notable. The novel began serializing in 1899 and came out in book form in 1900, which is very appropriate since it is in many senses a bridge between the centuries' literature. Elevated language and a historical background tie it to the nineteenth century, but its techniques are distinctly Modernist. Lord is indeed one of Modernist literature's very first examples, far closer in narrative spirit to its wildly experimental novels than to Conrad's Victorian contemporaries. It is told from various perspectives, primarily via a long story by Marlow, familiar from "Heart of Darkness" and other Conrad works. Nested dialogue abounds, and there is also narrative in letter form as well as other complex methods. This multi-faceted approach is fascinatingly wide, giving a grand view of the proceedings. It can be hard to follow, especially as it is far from linear, but I strongly encourage anyone struggling to persevere. As nearly always in such cases, it becomes easier, and the threads come together in the end - indeed spectacularly, if catastrophically, so. Conrad's deft handling of these complicated devices is truly admirable - a difficult artistic feat pulled off with rare acumen.

The novel is notable for many other reasons, not least its intriguing peek into a world of sea adventures that is now near-unimaginable. The glimpse of Eastern cultures nearly unknown in the West even now is particularly noteworthy, and the ongoing contrasts between East/West, white/non-white, etc. are dramatized vividly and skillfully. Those with historical interest in the era or place will be particularly invigorated, but the sociological value is at least as high. We learn much about how Victorian society - and of course Conrad, though his style as ever makes it dangerous to draw sweeping conclusions - thought of such cultures and vice versa. This aspect of Conrad's fiction initially overshadowed more important ones, but we can now appreciate them in proportion.

As always with Conrad, the prose is also of great significance. He is one of English's great prose stylists, which is truly incredible considering that it was his third language. This has some of his most lyrical and sublimely beautiful writing, whether describing exotic landscapes or the darkness at humanity's heart. The prose is indeed so great that it is one of many reasons making this often difficult read worthwhile.

Neophytes would be better off starting with Conrad's more accessible short stories or relatively approachable novels like The Secret Agent, but anyone alive to his fiction - or great literature of any kind - must stop here eventually.

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) was of Polish noble heritage though he was born in the Ukraine. He spent many years in the British navy and was a naturalized English citizen. Conrad wrote brilliant English novels and short stories; often thought in French and dreamed in Russian! Conrad is one of the greatest novelists in all of world literature.
Lord Jim was published to great success in 1900. The story concerns Jim the scion of an English country parson
who has taken to the salt water world. Jim is a romantic who dreams of doing great deeds of adventure and heroism.
The main narrator of the story is Captain Charles Marlow an old sea dog who first meets Jim when the later is earning a meagre living as a water clerk. Marlow relates the tragic story of Jim to a group of listeners. Jim is serving on an old wreck of a ship "The Patna" captained by a drunk. One surreal night of placidity is destroyed when the boat hits a submerged obstacle. On board are five crew members and 800 Muslim pilgrims from Malaya. In a moment of cowardice, Jim jumps overboard leaving the passengers to their fate. The Naval Board revokes Jim's license as well as that of the other four members of the crew. The events of the trial are told by a French sea captain who converses with Marlowe. Ironically the Patna and her passengers survive the night being brought to port in safety.
Marlowe seeks to help the complex Jim find a job despite his disgrace. The young man leaves one job after another as he travels from one remote and filthy seaport after another in Asis and the Dutch East Indies. Marlowe is most successful placing Jim in a job when Stein the respected owner of a trading post on the remote island of Patusan gives Jim a chance for employment. Stein is a brilliant collector of rare butterflies and an intellectual man of means.
When Jim arrives on Patusan he is protected from harm by the use he makes of a ring given him by Stein. Doramin the old island chieftan is a friend of Stein; gradually Jim is accepted into Patusan society winning the love of
Jewel the daughter of the evil old trader named Cornelius. Jim also becomes the best friend of Dormain's son
Dain Warus. The natives admire Jim and dub him "Tuan" or "Lord" Jim. He becomes the white leader of the native community. Jim leads the natives in their conquering of a hated rajah; prosperity is returned to the island paradise Jim calls home. He has respect, a good woman's love and the admiration of his fellows. Jim has no desire to return to white society.
Big trouble intrudes into paradise with the appearance of the odious pirate Gentleman Brown. Years later a moribund Brown will tell Marlowe the story of Jim's final days. Jim allows Brown to escape and Dain Warus is slain by the pirates. Old Cornelius proves to be a Judas collaborating with Brown in plotting mayhem and murder in the island community. Jim knows he has for the second time in his short life let down his friends! Jim bares his breast to old Doramin who shots and kills the young Englishman. This tragic death was Jim's form of repentance for his misdeeds. Lord Jim may be viewed as a symbol of the Lord Jesus Christ who dies so that others might live.
Conrad takes the late Victorian adventure tale and turns it on its head! He uses multiple narrators to tell the story though the chief narrator is Marlowe (who stands in for Conrad). The novel is rich in metaphor (particularly using insect and bird imagery in referring to characters) and the pitiless apathy of nature to the fate of humanity. The godless Conradian cosmos reminds this reader of similar beliefs posited by Thomas Hardy in his many novels. Many of the passages deal with Conrad's thoughts on such topics as: honor; the human community linked in this story by the fellowship of seamen and their craft; death, love and man's place in the scheme of things.
Conrad greatly influenced twentieth century ways of telling a story through innovative storytelling methods. Conrad is not an easy writer to read but he was a poet of the pen in exploring the depths of the heart of darkness pumping in the breasts of human beings. Conrad is best enjoyed by mature readers. If you have not read him since your high school English teacher forced you to do so pick up this excellent new edition by Penguin and explore Jim who is one of us!

Lord Jim is Joseph Conrad's most popular novel and possibly his best, which truly says much. A dark tale of human frailty with profound psychological insight, revolutionary narrative techniques, and sublime prose, it is essential for fans of Conrad and classics generally.

The most immediate and lasting feature is probably the dense portrayal of the title character, one of literature's most memorable tragic heroes and most fascinating character studies. What makes him so engrossing is that he in many ways has great potential - he certainly has enough strength and determination to be a successful, even admirable leader - yet somehow embarks on a downward spiral leading to bleak death. He is the essence of Conrad's dark vision - average in many respects and extraordinary in some but burdened with a character flaw that leads to his demise. As in much of Conrad, there is a strong fatalistic streak. Jim never would have thought himself capable of the act that led to his ruin, others would have thought it equally impossible, and he is unable to understand it himself while regretting it bitterly - yet it happened. Conrad's real claim seems to be not that it was fated but that humans are inherently frail and that individual flaws will come out in even the most staunch given the right situation - which only the truly lucky avoid. It is easy to condemn Jim, but Conrad was never one to take an obvious moral route, depicting him with characteristically thought-provoking ambivalence. The narrator cannot deny his act's essential despicableness but sees that Jim still has much worth. One of Conrad's great artistic strengths is that he gives much food for proverbial thought but never sinks to the heavy-handedness so common in many other heavy writers and nearly always fatal. Jim is shown from several angles with astounding verisimilitude and piercing psychological perspicuity, but it is up to us to judge him and all he stands for - if we can. Even the harshest cannot deny his essential humanity, which is what makes him so compelling; loathsome as he conventionally is, we recognize the tempestuous darkness beneath his impressive exterior because we have seen it in ourselves. Conrad made a career out of exposing this darkness, and this is a prime example.

The ground-breaking and highly influential narrative structure is nearly as notable. The novel began serializing in 1899 and came out in book form in 1900, which is very appropriate since it is in many senses a bridge between the centuries' literature. Elevated language and a historical background tie it to the nineteenth century, but its techniques are distinctly Modernist. Lord is indeed one of Modernist literature's very first examples, far closer in narrative spirit to its wildly experimental novels than to Conrad's Victorian contemporaries. It is told from various perspectives, primarily via a long story by Marlow, familiar from "Heart of Darkness" and other Conrad works. Nested dialogue abounds, and there is also narrative in letter form as well as other complex methods. This multi-faceted approach is fascinatingly wide, giving a grand view of the proceedings. It can be hard to follow, especially as it is far from linear, but I strongly encourage anyone struggling to persevere. As nearly always in such cases, it becomes easier, and the threads come together in the end - indeed spectacularly, if catastrophically, so. Conrad's deft handling of these complicated devices is truly admirable - a difficult artistic feat pulled off with rare acumen.

The novel is notable for many other reasons, not least its intriguing peek into a world of sea adventures that is now near-unimaginable. The glimpse of Eastern cultures nearly unknown in the West even now is particularly noteworthy, and the ongoing contrasts between East/West, white/non-white, etc. are dramatized vividly and skillfully. Those with historical interest in the era or place will be particularly invigorated, but the sociological value is at least as high. We learn much about how Victorian society - and of course Conrad, though his style as ever makes it dangerous to draw sweeping conclusions - thought of such cultures and vice versa. This aspect of Conrad's fiction initially overshadowed more important ones, but we can now appreciate them in proportion.

As always with Conrad, the prose is also of great significance. He is one of English's great prose stylists, which is truly incredible considering that it was his third language. This has some of his most lyrical and sublimely beautiful writing, whether describing exotic landscapes or the darkness at humanity's heart. The prose is indeed so great that it is one of many reasons making this often difficult read worthwhile.

Neophytes would be better off starting with Conrad's more accessible short stories or relatively approachable novels like The Secret Agent, but anyone alive to his fiction - or great literature of any kind - must stop here eventually.

That title is a knock-off of Ishmael's description of Captain Ahab in Melville's Moby Dick. My guess is that Joseph Conrad never read Moby Dick. His writing career unfolded during the decades before the rediscovery of Melville. I have no doubt that Conrad would have burst with appreciation if he'd encountered the other "greatest" writer of sea tales in English or any language. Lord Jim begins to remind me of Moby Dick in chapter four, when the straightforward 3rd person narrative suddenly shifts to Conrad's typically indirect narration in the first person voice of Captain Marlow. Thereafter, Jim's whole adventure is embedded in Marlow's rambling discourse, to the utter despair of high school sophomores and middle-age armchair travelers who "just want the story, ma'm."

So who is Marlow? Is he just a convenient mask for Conrad? Why is so much text devoted to Marlow's musing about his own "peripheral" role in the story and his own unresolved understanding of Jim? Does "Jim" really exist, outside of Marlow's penchant for entertaining friends with bizarre anecdotes? (The last few chapters, cast as a letter from Marlow to a friend, would seem to be intended to 'document' the truth of the tale.) Dear reader, you've better notice that Jim is remarkably inarticulate in Marlow's account; when he speaks, he almost never finishes a sentence, never establishes a discourse on his own terms. The Jim we get to know is as much a projection of Marlow's ego as Jesus of Nazareth was of the Apostle Paul's. And then, of course, we still have to wonder about the invisible author behind the so-obtrusive narrator.

What I'm arguing here is that the novel Lord Jim is about as much about the title character as Moby Dick is about the whale. Ahab's quest for ineffable vengeance by death is almost exactly parallel to Jim's quest for redemption by death. Both are ripping good adventure tales that COULD be told in eighty-page novellas or made into films from which the narrative voices are stripped and scattered on the floor of the editing studio. But just as the main character in Moby Dick is Ishmael, Marlow is the heart of obscurity in Lord Jim. To really relish either book, the reader has to take the narrator's epiphanies seriously.

Are we on any kind of solid ground in saying that Melville's novel is about a socially orphaned Ishmael projecting his need for a father Ahab? Shall we then risk the notion that Conrad's novel is about a psychologically impotent Marlow projecting his need for a son on Tuan Jim? Hey, reader! If you steal my notion and write a grad seminar paper with it, don't forget to vote "helpful" on my review!

This is an absurdly great novel, a book to read thoughtfully with mounting involvement until you can't attend to anything else before finishing it, a book to read again and again as your life changes perspective on itself. If you have doubts about Conrad's mastery of the English language, listen to this description:
"... we watched the moon float away above the chasm between the hills like an ascending spirit out of a grave; its sheen descended, cold and pale, like the ghost of dead sunlight. There is something haunting in the light of the moon... It is to our sunshine, which -- say what you like -- is all we have to live by, what the echo is to the sound: misleading and confusing whether the note by mocking or sad." That extended metaphor, to my mind, sets up perfectly the mood and the narrative thrust of Marlow's first long 'confessional' conversation with the disgraced sailor Jim, in which self-mockery and sadness afflict both parties.

I'd forgotten, or never realized, how deep this novel is, since I first read it perhaps twenty years ago. I hope I can come upon it with the same freshness and astonishment when I read it again, perhaps twenty years from now.

By Giordano Bruno (Wherever I am, I am.) - See all my reviews

That title is a knock-off of Ishmael's description of Captain Ahab in Melville's Moby Dick. My guess is that Joseph Conrad never read Moby Dick. His writing career unfolded during the decades before the rediscovery of Melville. I have no doubt that Conrad would have burst with appreciation if he'd encountered the other "greatest" writer of sea tales in English or any language. Lord Jim begins to remind me of Moby Dick in chapter four, when the straightforward 3rd person narrative suddenly shifts to Conrad's typically indirect narration in the first person voice of Captain Marlow. Thereafter, Jim's whole adventure is embedded in Marlow's rambling discourse, to the utter despair of high school sophomores and middle-age armchair travelers who "just want the story, ma'm."

So who is Marlow? Is he just a convenient mask for Conrad? Why is so much text devoted to Marlow's musing about his own "peripheral" role in the story and his own unresolved understanding of Jim? Does "Jim" really exist, outside of Marlow's penchant for entertaining friends with bizarre anecdotes? (The last few chapters, cast as a letter from Marlow to a friend, would seem to be intended to 'document' the truth of the tale.) Dear reader, you've better notice that Jim is remarkably inarticulate in Marlow's account; when he speaks, he almost never finishes a sentence, never establishes a discourse on his own terms. The Jim we get to know is as much a projection of Marlow's ego as Jesus of Nazareth was of the Apostle Paul's. And then, of course, we still have to wonder about the invisible author behind the so-obtrusive narrator.

What I'm arguing here is that the novel Lord Jim is about as much about the title character as Moby Dick is about the whale. Ahab's quest for ineffable vengeance by death is almost exactly parallel to Jim's quest for redemption by death. Both are ripping good adventure tales that COULD be told in eighty-page novellas or made into films from which the narrative voices are stripped and scattered on the floor of the editing studio. But just as the main character in Moby Dick is Ishmael, Marlow is the heart of obscurity in Lord Jim. To really relish either book, the reader has to take the narrator's epiphanies seriously.

Are we on any kind of solid ground in saying that Melville's novel is about a socially orphaned Ishmael projecting his need for a father Ahab? Shall we then risk the notion that Conrad's novel is about a psychologically impotent Marlow projecting his need for a son on Tuan Jim? Hey, reader! If you steal my notion and write a grad seminar paper with it, don't forget to vote "helpful" on my review!

This is an absurdly great novel, a book to read thoughtfully with mounting involvement until you can't attend to anything else before finishing it, a book to read again and again as your life changes perspective on itself. If you have doubts about Conrad's mastery of the English language, listen to this description:
"... we watched the moon float away above the chasm between the hills like an ascending spirit out of a grave; its sheen descended, cold and pale, like the ghost of dead sunlight. There is something haunting in the light of the moon... It is to our sunshine, which -- say what you like -- is all we have to live by, what the echo is to the sound: misleading and confusing whether the note by mocking or sad." That extended metaphor, to my mind, sets up perfectly the mood and the narrative thrust of Marlow's first long 'confessional' conversation with the disgraced sailor Jim, in which self-mockery and sadness afflict both parties.

I'd forgotten, or never realized, how deep this novel is, since I first read it perhaps twenry years ago. I hope I can come upon it with the same freshness and astonishment when I read it again, perhaps twenty years from now.

The beginning of the book is great. The last half of the book is great. But after the first few chapters the reading gets quite dry for a while. I'd call it a pacing problem. I almost quit reading--but I'm glad I didn't. I guess it's probably standard for Conrad, though. I remember having a bit of the same love-hate relationship with The Secret Agent. Were it not for that middle section of Lord Jim, I would give the book five stars. As usual, Conrad goes deep into human psychology with an amazing command of the English language.

The beginning of the book is great. The last half of the book is great. But after the first few chapters the reading gets quite dry for a while. I'd call it a pacing problem. I almost quit reading--but I'm glad I didn't. I guess it's probably standard for Conrad, though. I remember having a bit of the same love-hate relationship with The Secret Agent. Were it not for that middle section of Lord Jim, I would give the book five stars. As usual, Conrad goes deep into human psychology with an amazing command of the English language.

I actually started listening to this as an audio book on a road trip with my family. My wife and son couldn't make it through the first hour since they felt like it took forever to describe the key incident in the story. I continued with the book and found that I eventually got used to this style of writing. From a literary point of view, it is a beautiful and impressive style. Conrad paints a very graphic picture with his metaphors that is almost never used in modern writing. Reading this book was an experience I'm glad that I had, though I'm still not sure this is my favorite style. The narrative format also took some getting used to; the jumping back and forth was effective, but took some concentration.

As far as the story goes, it explored the effects of guilt in a man. Great novels help us understand key points of human thought and relationships and this book clearly falls in this category. You find yourself understanding the main failings and actions of the key character. I came away from this book with a reinforced understanding of the need of forgiveness, especially for oneself. Obviously it is easier to tell someone to forgive themselves than it is to actually forgive yourself.

Overall I recommend this book for those interested in literature; the use of metaphors is incredible. This book is not for everyone, but is worth it for those wanting to experience Conrad at his finest.

Honour, like virtue, or like reputation, is more easily lost than regained. Such is the premise of Lord Jim. Conrad himself half-admits in his cover note that this is probably his best novel. For more than an absorbing tale of guilt, love, and adventure, it is also a book that asks big and incisive questions. What is honour? Is there such a thing in life as principle? Or rather can one live without principles and, if not, then what if one has to die for them?

Jim is young and idealistic, a talented and unafraid sailor, but he has made an early mistake, a lapse that caused him to abandon ship at the wrong time. Relegated to the fringe of the mariners' community, he drifts into in a lost corner of the Indonesian islands. It is there that he becomes Lord Jim, a pacifier, an arbiter among the local folk, a living legend. The lost province of Patusan, besides, is where he finds romance in the person of the smart, attractive, and spirited half-caste Jewel. Yet as strife re-emerges in the shape of a pirate raid on the town, Jim is soon torn between the defence of his patiently rebuilt self-regard and his love and life's salvation.

Lord Jim is told in two parts, both drawing minutely and to striking effect from Conrad's personal experience of the sea and the tropics. First comes the strange and paradoxical shipwreck of the Patna, a transport for Meccan pilgrims on which Jim acts as skipper. Then the book follows Jim in his subsequent drift and his reinvention in Patusan. The story is told by sea captain Charles Marlow, the same narrator Conrad has in Heart of Darkness, here however developed as a character at greater length and to greater effect. Finally, for those worried about political correctness, this is no tale of the white man come to rule over the brown, and Conrad's humanistic credentials only come out reinforced. Lord Jim is required reading for fans of Conrad and, capturing the values of a disappearing world like no other, one of the great novels of the turn of the twentieth century.

Joseph Conrad's novels are ambitious.

The main character 'Jim' in this story tries to 'save from the fire his idea of what is his moral identity', after he failed to rescue the life of muslim pilgrims in an apparent shipwreck.

He is haunted by the guilt instilled by his father's (the good old parson) religion: 'who once gives way to temptation, in the very instant hazards his total depravity and everlasting ruin.'

Jim stands alone and above the 'stupid brutality of crowds', in a world where 'a massacre was a lesson, a retribution - a demonstration of some obscure and awful attribute of our nature, which is not so very far under the surface as we like to think', where 'the Irrational lurks at the bottom of every thought, sentiment, sensation, emotion.'

Joseph Conrad's vision of humanity is very pessimistic indeed.

Jim's fate constitutes the bankruptcy of all that stays for 'a moral identity'. He is the lonely hero who considers that what he did was 'a more than criminal weakness', not 'honest faith' or the expression of 'the instinct of courage'.

He (one of us) stood alone within the bunch of criminal whites (us) and above the innocent savages (them).

For Joseph Conrad, his fate is the result of 'the implacable destiny of which we are the victims and the tools.'

One of the villains in this book, Brown, foreshadows the main character in Conrad's magisterial novel 'Heart of Darkness'.

This book is not without some melodramatic effects (an idyllic love affair) or superlatives ('eyes as immensely deep wells'); however, it is a great novel by an ambitious author.

It is the voice of Marlowe telling the story, reflecting on Jim, creating worlds in depth through descriptions that bring to life the most exotic places and forbidden realities , which holds us and enraptures us through the book. It is the voice of Marlowe which sustains that sense of wonder and reflection, and which makes of the character of Jim, and his actions, a mystery that moves us.

The story of the young seaman who dreams dreams of glory and in a moment loses nerve, jumps from a ship, marks himself with the sign of cowardice, has a second part in which Jim becomes the leader, the custodian of a people in East India. And there he redeems himself, by his courage and responsibility- though his end too bears with it the ambiguity which seems to mark the questioning tone of the narrator throughout.

This is the way Conrad has Marlow describe it.

"It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun."

Conrad's greatness as a writer is in the evocation of atmosphere, and in the creation of character. It is in the storytelling methods in which different points- of - view make Reality appears as an intriguing set of complexities.

This is arguably Conrad's best novel, and the reading of it is a voyage in heart and mind which uplift as it deepens our wonder at the varied and mysterious character of life.

Joseph Conrad's stories are generally regarded as classic literature, but tend to be difficult to read, especially Lord Jim. It is a story of the downfall of a ship's officer after he wimps out at a crucial moment. Where a less sensitive individual may have found the ability to survive, Jim in haunted by his own inner guilt about the incident. He gradually withdraws from white society.
The novel tends to digress and sidetrack while developing characters, so it is some way into the story before the reader learns exactly why Jim is before a maritime court, and even farther along before you discover what actually happened to the steamer Patna. Jim had a deep desire to do heroic deeds, but an error in judgement makes him a goat. The balance of the novel is on the life Jim made for himself, and on the people he associates with, as told by a narrator.
The novel was first published circa 1900, and reflects the white European attitude towards native populations during that time period.

Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad delves into the anguished conscience of a junior officer who fails his own conscience when he deserts a sinking ship, filled with pilgrims to Mecca, though he does so following the lead of his utterly debased and incompetent captain. Jim relives the cowardice that undermine his self-image years before as a trainee officer when he shirked the menace of a looming tempest. own from grace and who is unable to come to terms with it. In the second part of the novel narrated by Conrad's frequent narrator, Marlowe, urges to redeem himself hoping against hope saying, perhaps lying to himself, that, 'I always thought that if a fellow could begin with a clean slate'.

Conrad makes it clear that Jim's cowardice is not exceptional; he would not have the reader condemn or despise him; even the captain of the abandoned Patna is not extraordinarily contemptible for his dereliction of duty; but he is despicable because he makes no effort to redeem himself. The court of inquiry that investigates the crew's desertion of the Patna effectively excuses the officers, simply advising Jim to lose himself amid the human flotsam around the ports of southeast Asia. Jim complies, ostracising himself for years, working as a chandler, until chance brings an opportunity for him to regain his dignity through sacrificing himself for Malay villagers preyed upon by pirates.

Marlow provides insights into Jim's conduct and character, telling the reader:'The time was coming when I should see him loved, trusted, admired, with a legend of strength and prowess forming round his name as though he had been the stuff of a hero.' Through Marlow, the reader also expects Jim to prove himself to be more than an ordinary man, one who would not only save himself from self-contempt, but who would provide an exemplar that others would look up, not only for his courage but also for his humility.'He had the gift of finding a special meaning in everything that happened to him.'

"Lord Jim" is worth reading many times, not only for its psychological depths concerning a man who hopes to be more than the world has a right to expect of him. It is also a book that unfolds a landscape combined with a seascape at the turn of the century when Asia and Europe were coming together in the Pacific Basin, and when greed and fear clashed with innovation and personal acts of sacrifice.

Lord Jim

The experience of reading Lord Jim makes it clear that the writing of the novel was interrupted. It was begun in the summer of 1898 and then taken up again after Joseph Conrad had written Heart of Darkness. The relationship of Lord Jim with Heart of Darkness is very close.

The first part of the novel is concerned with the episode on board the Patna in which Jim?s failure to meet an emergency with courage marks him psychologicaly and provokes his desertion from the community of colonists. The second part is less coherently constructed, and is concerned with the adventures of Jim in the remote jungle of Patusan, where he is regarded as Lord Jim among the natives. The story is thus deeply concerned with the question of Jim?s problematic rehabilitation after his moral breach with the community. On the other hand, the novel is a pioneering work of Modernism and as such it traces the ideological and existential origins of the new writing techniques.

Edward Said said that the vision of Joseph Conrad was "totally dominated by the Atlantic West". As such, is he writing technique also to be labelled as Western? Modernism?s concern to address different voices and include extraneous narratives would circumscribe this view.

Early on in the novel we are confronted with different notions of spiritual salvation. The Arab pilgrims on board the Patna are said to have left their homes following "an exacting belief". But Jim is motivated by a sensualist, modernistic interpretation of the world?s hieroglyph. When he meets a storm, he feels that the elements are directed at him. The group of people who the narrative addresses is generally supposed to share Jim?s modernistic conceptions: "in our own hearts we trust for our salvation in the men that surround us, in the sights that fill our eyes, in the sounds that fill our ears, a and in the air that fills our lungs." Thus the narrative presupposes a community of modern, Western readers, untroubled by a fixed, Eastern religious conscience. The modernistic mindset of the novel seems to have been in its origins a broadly Western affair.

Captain Marlow meets Jim a month or so after the affair on board the ship and sympathises with his case. Marlow is moved by Jim?s apparent English steadfastness, his "faith invulnerable to the strength of facts, to the contagion of example, to the solicitation of ideas". How can such a perfect constitution have been wayled? What is it in Jim that announced a breaking up in the ideology of the superior white man? In order to discover the reason why this has happened to Jim, Marlow must learn to read the hidden logic behind the apparent delirium of facts. His efforts to narrate Jim?s problematic failure and rehabilitation will go to create a new narrative technique, which is going to be characerised by its slow motion and by the slavery to impressions.

The interest of the novel, like at parts the interest of the Court Enquiry, is thus deeply psychological. What matters is "the expectation of some essential disclosure as to the strength, the power, the horror, of human emotions". The white man is troubled by the necessity to confront the intolerable representation of some unknown force - perhaps embodied in the colonial subject, perhaps alighting in the utmost recesses of his own soul - which might explain that pervading self-doubt casting a ray of darkness on his glorious self-reflection. It is the beginning of the end of the innocent stage of the imperial business. And the way from innocence leads to "the horror" that will be central to Heart of Darkness too.

The enterprise of the empire can only be sustained on the strictest moral grounds, to be specially observed by the British and American colonialists. "We aren?t an organised body of men," says Captain Brierly, "and the only thing that holds us together is just the name for that kind of decency". Without decency, confidence on the good purpose of the empire is lost.

The breaking up of the white man?s ideology of empire is shown through Conrad?s ironic technique, which can be handled only from a consistently Western, unified point of view. It is for this reason that Conrad does not include different cultural visions in his writing, his technique does not need them to succeed.

The confrontation of the dark recesses of the imperial experience threatens to disrupt established cognitive notions of truth and falsehood, of right and wrong. Jim?s moral rupture is like the crack that threatens to disestablish the whole. The "white man?s burden" is therefore touched by the tragic. Jim?s passivity at a time when heroic action was called for has nothing short of the malediction in it. Is the Empire... to be cursed? Is Jim really guilty, or has he simply been haunted?

Jim?s search for rehabilitation requires no expiation to speak of. Can Jim fairly be judged as a moral agent when he has felt himself to be deprived of his will entirely throughout the affair? The whole episode acquires for him the character of low comedy, of a devilish farce. In Marlow?s retelling: "he had preserved through it all a strange illusion of passiveness, as though he had not acted but had suffered himself to be handled by the infernal powers who had selected him for the victim of their practical joke."

His story is ultimately one of failure, since for man?s life to become utterance, his life must be part of a community. It does not matter what degree or honour you fulfil, the important thing is to belong. Marlow?s series of confidences, to the reader and to other characters, on the nature of honour, courage, and regret, eventually disclose that Jim?s soul is ultimately haunted by the riddle of being: "A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea".

Young Jim was probably never meant for the sea. As described by Joseph Conrad, the title character of "Lord Jim" had no real love for ocean voyage or relish for adventure except when it was inside his own head. His "dreams and the success of his imaginary achievements" were "the best parts of life, its secret truth, its hidden reality." His passage to the Far East was destined to prove a ticket to failure, and so it was, when he abandoned a foundering vessel filled with pilgrims to save himself.

Now his shame is the stuff of conversation in every roadstead and harbor between India and Australia. Can the chastened dreamer manage to recover his lost sense of honor in a distant land where no white man will come to tell of his past mistake?

"Lord Jim" may be set in the Pacific, but its ideas are universal, as Conrad takes on the contradictions behind the Western concepts of honor and bravery. Published in 1900, the novel feels like the start of the modern literary era in both its loose, ambling structure and its questioning of the base convictions of right and wrong still girding society today. "Lord Jim" hasn't lost much of anything in the 105 years since it was published. If anything, it's more relevant than ever.

Who is Jim? Is he a hero, a coward, or a victim? Is he all three? Part of the problem pegging him is the fact the fellow doing most of the talking about him, cagey Marlow the narrator, doesn't seem too sure himself. That ambiguity is another way in which the novel is modern. At one point Marlow even seems to suggest Jim is no more than a figment of his imagination.

"He existed for me, and after all it is only through me that he exists for you," he tells his anonymous group of listeners at one point. It's interesting Marlow is only identified by his last name and Jim by his first. Are they two halves of the same person?

While playing with the metaphysics of identity and of right and wrong make "Lord Jim" vital and important, Conrad's deep engagement in humanity's many odd and nasty facets makes it fun. He creates a myriad of secondary characters inhabiting the backwaters of the West Indies, of varying moral shadings, finding amusement in even the cruelest.

One singular nogoodnik tells Marlow he wants the disgraced Jim to work for him on a barren island harvesting guano. It's not much of an offer, he knows, but there is one benefit: "Anyhow, I could guarantee the island wouldn't sink under him - and I believe he is a bit particular on that point."

"Lord Jim" is a great book not for its message so much as its lived-in depth, a sense we are really there on Marlow's steamy veranduh amid casuarina trees or aboard a creaking brigantine sailing placid under a crepuscular sky. Conrad really engages you as a reader, and while he plays with the narrative structure, and allows the story to drift quite a bit, often frustrating me and other readers at least the first time through, the book remains engaging and illustrative about both its theme and subject.

Dark? Yes, but not oppressively so. In a way, Conrad is taking a humanistic approach to a nihilistic question, asking what good notions of honor and glory really do mankind when most of us aren't fated to join life's immortals. Do we have the right to expect more of ourselves than life itself allows?

At one point, when a minor character obsessed with his sense of honor kills himself, Conrad asks a burning question worth keeping in mind: "Who can tell what flattering he had induced himself to take of his own suicide?"

Conrad is not only one of the finest stylists writing in the English language, he is also one of the best to tackle moral issues. A good writer, as we know, does not preach morality, but rather conjures up bits of life that really make us think about who we are. Lord Jim is the story of a man poised to be at the pinnacle of human heroism and ability, who comes face to face with the horror of his weaknesses. Jim is a guy who gives us every sign of being a hero, a reason for pride in the human race, only to take flight at the last moment. Having committed a brutal act of betrayal in a moment of weakness, he sets off to escape his conscience - running away but never quite getting away. No matter how many good things a man can do, Conrad shows us, he can undo in a few seconds.
Colonialism figures heavily into the thematic core of the book. We are made to think throughout about the issue of race and racial relations. Does the Western conscience always, if even subconsciously, think itself superior or of more worth to the Eastern? Do we overlook heinous evils in others in favor of tenuous racial connections and conformist attitudes? All of this is explored in the book, as Conrad takes us on an escape from the heart of darkness.

Jim is a youthful, handsome, water clerk aboard the Patna, a vessel escorting 800 Islamic individuals to Mecca. He supposedly has his entire career ahead of him. With no warning, the Patna collides with something on the Asian waters and it appears that the Patna is about to founder. Jim jumps off the vessel, along with a number of ship officers in order to save their own skins.

Jim, along with his fellow mates survive. The abandoned "unfortunate" 800 others face a certain death. It does not seem to matter that the whole lot of them are eventually rescued. It is solely Jim who readily accepts the onus of "coward," which Jim is labeled after an official naval inquest into the incident. Besides losing his seaman's license, Jim must suffer the rest of his days seaching for a way to rehabilitate his sullied reputation.

Jim escapes to an obscure East Indies island, called Patusan, where the natives come to view Jim as a god. They call Jim "Tuan," which means lord...in other words he becomes "Lord Jim." During his escape to Patusan, our new lord gets involved in a war to ovethrow the evil Rajah. A rehabilitated character is sure to follow the newly anointed "hero."

While the book has interesting characterizations and is holding to a certain extent, I found Conrad's emphasis on Jim's Christ-like martyrdom a little much. Jim seems to revel in his suffering which I, for one, do not find particularly heroic.

After reading this book (along with several other of Conrad's books) I am under the impression that Joseph Conrad may very well be my favorite author. Here is another masterpiece, a deeply incisive study of character of the motivation and the ultimate failure of all high-minded ideals. Granted my own personal world view falls directly in line with this realization and therefore prejudices me towards anything the man might write, but, when considering such a lofty title as 'favorite author' one must regard other aspects of the novelist's creation. As with the others, Conrad wins by the power of his stories.
Lord Jim is my least favorite of the the four books I have read by Conrad. The story is rather scattered: a righteous young man does something wrong that he holds himself far too accountable for and the public shame the action brought him exaggerates the reality of his failure and makes him believe the rumors swirling around about his so-called cowardice. He spends the remainder of his life trying to reclaim his self-regard, mostly exaggerating his own importance in matters he hardly understands. His goal is to liberate the primitive people of the jungle paradise he inadvertantly finds himself in (due to an effort to escape every particle of the world he once inhabited) and his once high-minded ideals and regard for himself lead him to allow those people to consider him almost a God.
Jim likes being a God and considers himself a just and fair one. He treats everyone equally and gives to his people the knowledge of modern science and medicine as well as the everyday archetecture and understanding of trade that those primitive folks would otherwise be years from comprehending.
Of course everything ends in failure and misery and of course Jim's restored name will be returned to its demonic status, but the whole point of the novel seems to me that one can not escape their past. Jim, for all his courage in the line of fire has tried to avoid all memory of the once shameful act of his former life and by doing so becomes destined to repeat his mistakes.
Lord Jim is far more expansive than the story it sets out to tell, ultimately giving a warning on the nature of history and general humanity that only a writer of Conrad's statue could hope to help us understand.
If there is a flaw it is not one to be taken literally. Conrad was a master of structural experimentation and with Lord Jim he starts with a standard third person narrative to relate the background and personalities of his characters and then somehow merges this into a second person narrative of a man, years from the events he is relating, telling of the legend of Jim. It is a brilliant innovation that starts off a little awkward and might lead to confusion in spots as the story verges into its most important parts under the uncertain guidence of a narrator who, for all his insight into others, seems unwilling to relate his personal relevence to the story he is relating.
Nevertheless (with a heartfelt refrain), one of the best books I have ever read.