Lord Jim (Oxford World's Classics)

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.

I received a Kindle for Xmas, but am so broke I can only afford to borrow from the library and "buy" public domain material from the store at $0.00--right in my price range! I'd never read Joseph Conrad so decided to try one. "Lord Jim" started kind of interesting in a difficult way, but after a while I sent this note to my nephew:

This Conrad is driving me insane. I can not read more than 2 chapters at a pop without starting to pull my hair out. I have never seen any noted author take so long to get from A to B, but I've passed 90% and will finish. It's almost inconceivable that I could care about what happens to these characters--I just want them out of my life at this point. One hallmark of a great book is that you don't want it to end. By that standard, "Lord Jim" is disqualified. End rant. I will say this about Conrad, his depiction of loathsome characters is memorable. Unfortunately, that's exactly the kind of thing that you don't want stuck in your head. And later.

I finished "Lord Jim." I considered not going back to it, but decided to open the Kindle and see where I stood. It was at 96%. I had to finish. I'll say this: Conrad did not piddle with that last 4%, but ended it in a straightforward way. For me, however, the resolution was pointless. I did learn one thing: never read Conrad again.

I read this book in high school and then saw the film. I have read it several more times over the years and it keeps getting better every time. I like any story of a character that betrays and then seeks redemption. If you like such a story with extras then I recommend "Lord Jim".

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?

I am not the person to review a classic, but I can give my opinion. This is elegantly written, the style is captivating, and I'm delighted by the style in which Conrad lets out facts slowly.

That said, I like books to move along at a faster pace. At about 40% of the way through, I just stopped. I've got other things to read.

Thus "Lord Jim" joins "The Count of Monte Cristo" and "Tristam Shandy." I couldn't finish those either.

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.

I guess the question is, if you stop being a coward when no one is looking, does it really matter? Sometimes derided as one guy telling a story to a clearly captive audience for about eleven hours (the fact that people seemingly bothered to calculate this makes me believe that even literary criticism has some form of a sense of humor), its actually a psychological study of a person whose thoughts we never really get into, desperate to penetrate the interior mind of the title character despite doing everything it can to maintain a distance. The climax of the story comes in a letter written to someone else, neither of whom are the person the letter is discussing. For the first decade of the 1900s, this is probably what passed for "Ulysses" levels of literary experimentation. It probably read as a weirdly structured book then and even after decades of being exposed to postmodern novels, it still reads kind of odd to me.

Which is interesting because the plot itself is more or less straightforward. Jim wants to be a sailor, unfortunately when he gets to be a sailor he sort of blows it by panicking and jumping off a ship he's pretty sure is sinking and as it turns out "abandoning everyone to die" ranks just a hair above "don't feed the sharks" in the world of nautical no-no's. He's not the only offender but he winds up being the one who has to stand trial and after the humiliation of being branded with the big C, he eventually lives a life of quiet shame before ending up on a distant island where he makes good with the natives and is quite content to abandon the outside world. Unfortunately this isn't a light-hearted comedy of redemption so if you're under the impression that any of it will end well I should remind you that this is the same author who wrote "Heart of Darkness" and not a book called "Happy Jungle Playland".

Given a plot that basically winds up being a litany of things going wrong in someone's life before collapsing tragically, Conrad decides to tell the story in the most obtuse way possible. Pretty much the entire story is narrated by old standby Marlow, except for moments when it shifts into third person omniscient narration and he tells the story of Jim's initial cowardice in the most abstract way possible, almost going of his way to make the telling as roundabout as he can. Key facts are withheld until certain moments (it took me a while to figure out that the ship had encountered trouble) and you may find yourself darting back a few pages every so often to check if you had missed a reference or trying to figure out who a character is that just popped up. On some level its maddening because you've given all these dangling pieces to put together and the writing is so dense that its hard to tell at times if Conrad is parceling out new facts or you just missed something along the way. But it also made me work in a way that a book hasn't in a while, part of that is the old fashioned turn of the century style but part of it is the way that Conrad keeps trying to mix things up, layering stories within stories as Marlow tells us what's happening without ever letting us get a direct peak into Jim's head.

The shift from the trial to the island sequences may come as a bit of a welcome relief, although again the storytelling isn't entirely straightforward, as Jim starts to engage in standard adventure stuff (fighting local warlords and bandits, or if you want to be less kind, acting as the white savior to a helpless people but I'll let people with more credentials than me get into the subtext of that) but with the extra layer of wanting to redeem himself for not being at his best. You can see the desperation in his acts and how hard he is on himself without ever really getting a glimpse into his inner workings, and a lot of what makes the book interesting in how everyone from Marlow on down interprets Jim and his actions, leaving it to the reader to figure out how much of their opinions to trust.

Even then the proceedings are still fairly roundabout and the shift to an island locale doesn't really alleviate the density of the prose, which seems bent on attacking everything from the most oblique angle possible. What saves it a lot of times is that just when Conrad makes you want to throw your hands in the air in frustration, he slips in these passages of sublime prose and insights that can pretty much carry you through the next knot of puzzling plotting.

Fortunately by the end the proceedings become almost remarkably straightforward considering all that's happened before (although in typical fashion, Conrad has a chunk of the finale relayed through a letter Marlow sends to someone he was telling the story to earlier, giving it yet another layer of distance) as he depicts with a rather dispassionate eye Jim's jungle paradise crashing down on top of him, leading to the ultimate tragedy of someone who never really had a chance to begin with, on some level beset by forces beyond his control and still beholden to the one bad decision he made in a fit of fear. Its that nearly suffocating sense of failure from someone trying to rise above and hide from their worst mistake that lifts the book over a formal exercise in narrative technique. Without Conrad's way of constantly shifting viewpoints, it would be nothing more than a story of a boy who could do no right and without Jim (and Marlow, to be fair) at the heart of it the novel would come across as Conrad playing games with the reader, daring them to unpack their weird narrative box he's created. It's not the easiest read at times and not a front-to-back masterpiece (I'll probably admire it far more than it will break my heart) but at its best it communicates that aching sense you can't outrun when you've discovered you're not as good as you imagined you were and the frustration that comes from constantly battering at the barrier of your own limitations and seeing nothing but the blood you leave behind as you're ultimately unable to get through.

Let me begin by saying that, when it comes to Conrad, I have a bias. I actually keep a picture of him on my writing desk. I have, in a sense, adopted him as a kind of muse, the literary equivalent of a patron saint. Here's an author who managed to achieve immortality by writing in a language that was not his own. Being an ESL writer myself, I draw inspiration from this. I have not read all of Conrad's works; I may not even have read half of them. But all I've read by him leaves an indelible mark upon me, and I must confess I am one of those people who are mad about _Heart of Darkness_ (and about T. S. Eliot's _The Waste Land_, but that's another story). _Lord Jim_ (1899) has been hailed as one of Conrad's highest achievements, and while I would not say it is perfect, nor that it is his most enjoyable work, I recommend this novel to anyone interested in the author or in literary modernism.

_Heart of Darkness_ was serialized between February and April of 1899. Conrad began to write _Lord Jim_ in September of that same year, and finished it in July of 1900. Two observations. First, given the short time span between the two works, it shouldn't come as a surprise that there are many similarities between them, the most obvious of which being that both feature Charles Marlow as the narrator, and in both cases Marlow talks to a group of people about a noteworthy person he knew. My other observation is that, having been completed within 11 months, the 312-page _Lord Jim_ should be considered not merely a novel, but a vision.

Most of _Lord Jim_ consists of a monologue that Marlow delivers while sitting on a verandah with a group of acquaintances. He tells the story of a man wracked with guilt over an unfortunate event he was involved in. The tale is related in a non-linear manner; rather, it follows the caprices of memory and emotion. Within Marlow's monologue, the speaker also reproduces the speech of other narrators who filled in the gaps of the story of Lord Jim, so that the reader often finds a voice within Marlow’s voice within Conrad’s voice. _Lord Jim_ is a literary puzzle that slowly falls into place. This will sound familiar to readers of Faulkner. As I read Conrad's novel, I could not stop thinking of _Absalom, Absalom!_ (an "oral," "dialogical" novel), and I was also reminded of certain passages in _Go Down, Moses_. _Lord Jim_ is an early example of the modernist polyphonic and multiperspective novel, which questioned the omniscient narrator that predominated in the nineteenth-century novel.

While similar to _Heart of Darkness_, _Lord Jim_ differs from it in many ways, two of which are quite important. From the genre perspective, _Heart of Darkness_ is a novella, while _Lord Jim_ is a novel. The former focuses on suggestion and reexamination; the latter, on development. Regarding the central characters, _Lord Jim_ offers what _Heart of Darkness_ does not: a sympathetic character. It is difficult to feel for Kurtz, but it is easy to identify with Jim. _Lord Jim_ is about honor, about guilt and the possibility of redemption. Like _Heart of Darkness_ it comments on the politics of intervention with subtle criticism (I was also reminded of Kipling's "The Man Who Would Be King"), but Jim is not as easy to condemn as Kurtz. However, one may ask, isn't evil--or darkness--more interesting? Perhaps. That's up to each reader, and so, many will prefer _Heart of Darkness_ over _Lord Jim_, for the same reason that many find Dante's _Inferno_ more compelling than the _Purgatorio_ and infinitely more interesting than the _Paradiso_. Personally, I like _Heart of Darkness_ better than _Lord Jim_ because I am a novella person, but I am thankful that Conrad also chose to write a novel that revolves around a "good guy". His fate speaks volumes about the role of goodness in an unscrupulous world. Conrad is at his most compassionate here. As Jim points out, shattering the good/evil binary, "Men act badly sometimes without being much worse than others" (296).

_Lord Jim_ does have its faults. As other reviewers have observed, it is a little too long, in the sense that it overstates the point. Some incidents could have been left out without detriment to the story. Would it have been better as a novella? Maybe, but then it would have been _Heart of Darkness_ with a sympathetic character at its center to replace the more censurable Kurtz. _Lord Jim_ is great as it is. After all, Faulkner isn't exactly focused either. Readers who like a straightforward, concise narrative should be aware that _Lord Jim_ is not that. The novel is still compelling and written with the elegance that is Conrad’s trademark. It is also one of the most satisfying explorations of the concept of honor written in the English language.

My next Conrad will be the novel many call his masterpiece: _Nostromo_ (1904).

Thanks for reading, and enjoy the book!

I had vague memories of the film and thought the free ebook might be a good ideas to revisit that story. I could never finish it. It is boring and repetitive. Maybe it could have been a decent short story.

“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?

I have been lord and master of an iron knee in the art of religion and philosophy, so reading Edward Crankshaw in the critical responses to Lord Jim helps me identify borderline situations in which regrets have far more complexity than the ideals which leadership was relying on to motivate those who became surrounded by epistemi9c realities any bug out would flee. I became aware of bits and pieces of a story that had trade tipping points. I quote what describes the author:

Conrad is not concerned with driving home
a clear-cut issue,
but with rendering a complete personali9ty
in relation to his environment==
a borderline position if ever there was one.

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.

I read this book long ago and gave it two stars. I thought at the time that it was really two books sort of sutured together at the nearly exact halfway point of the finished novel. It is written in a sophisticated style, somewhat challenging to decipher and is populated with a number of characters and stories which had a tendency at the time, for me, to take focus away from crucial plot elements.

In the meantime, recently, I saw the 1965 movie, with Peter O'Toole as Jim, and realized for the first time, to my embarrassment, the over-arching theme that ties the whole thing together. As a direct result of the movie, I picked up and re-read Lord Jim.

I have upped my rating to 4 stars from 2 as, this time through, I was able to follow the thread of Jim's dilemma cleanly from start to finish. And I have to say that Conrad does a good job. He is wordy - very wordy, and, IMHO, unnecessarily so. I believe he is verbose to the point of distraction.

Also, I could sympathize with those that say Jim, during his morose moping and depressed state, should have been slapped across the face and told to "Snap out of it!" This would make for a shorter novel, but perhaps a more realistic one!

This time, however, armed with the theme, which the movie makes clear, of trust - Jim's mistrust of himself, and the almost pathological need of Jim to instill trust in others - I could easily enjoy the plot and follow it nicely to the end, where Jim willingly puts his own existence on the line in order to follow through with his iron-clad promise to himself not to morally falter again, as he had done early on in his career.

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.

The end of the year brings so many lists, and Lord Jim has made its share. It's been touted by Modern Library and Le Monde for being in the "TOP 100" novels of the century. Reading Lord Jim for the first time, I was struck by how pulpy the experience was.

First, the book itself, a vintage early 1970s paperback that is of the size and weight to be sold in racks at a drug store magazine aisle in Topeka, Kansas. The cover shows a fierce looking guy glowering, and next to that is a drawing of men cast adrift at sea- perched precariously acrest a wave.

No doubt Lord Jim's classic status is over ascribed to the obvious psychological sophistication and under ascribed to the sheer mass market appeal of Conrad's exotic locations and multiple levels of accessibility. Conrad is like a children's tv show that puts in stuff for grown-ups on the sly.

Note that Lord Jim was originally published as a magazine serial, a mode of publication that requires popular audience interest. When you are talking about the reaction of an audience to a specific cultural product, it is best to use the term "reception" to take into the account that there is a critical and popular response to every cultural product which is published.

Lord Jim was published in serial the same year Heart of Darkness was published in book form: quite a one-two punch. If you look at Conrad's Bibliography, it's very much the familiar pattern of an Artist achieving critical success early and popular success late. Certainly, Conrad's catalog is not as well established as a Charles Dickens. I would actually say that Heart of Darkness is really, really the only true, lasting hit, but obviously it's a "novella" so in some sense it must not "count."

Heart of Darkness relates to Lord Jim exactly the same way an early 7" or EP relates to an LP relates for a musician: The first record demonstrates market potential to the audience, the second record fulfills that potential in the market place. Repeat.

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 was published at the very end of the 19th century, just after Joseph Conrad published one of his other classic books: Heart of Darkness. It's about a man who lives on the sea. As a young man he gets a job aboard the Patna and spends much of his time dreaming about one day becoming a hero. It's on this ship that he gets that opportunity. When the ship collides with the wreckage of another boat in the middle of the night, Jim is sent down to determine the extent of the damage. What he sees leads him to believe that the ship's hull is close to breaching and that the Patna will soon sink. The crew decides to abandon ship and to ensure their survival, decides not to wake the sleeping passengers, leaving them behind to go down with the ship. Jim decides that he is too insignificant a member of the crew to go against their decision, and leaves with them.

Unfortunately for Jim, the Patna doesn't sink, and its passengers are rescued by another vessel and the crew of the Patna faces a judicial investigation where Jim becomes the scape goat and is the only one punished for the abandonment. Jim's decision to go along with his crew mates haunts him for the rest of his life and it becomes a defining moment for him. The rest of his life is spent running away from anything that reminds him of his experience on the Patna. Eventually he finds success in a fictional region called Patusan where he becomes a leader among the native inhabitants and ultimately finds a measure of redemption when he gives his life in their defense.

Lord Jim is a great story. At times it's a little slow and tends to get confusing at times as the narrator jumps back and forth in time, recounting the history of Jim as he had become aware of it through the reports of people he met throughout his life. But the themes in this book are what I think have elevated it to the ranks of classic English Literature.

Many years ago I saw the movie 'Lord Jim' with Peter O'Toole and I thought it was a great flick with a lot of depth and very thought-provoking. It is one of my favorite films. So, I thought I would read the book since I've often found books to be even better than the movie. But, in this case I was sorely disappointed. The book, to me, was very hard to read with exceedingly long sentences and paragraphs and written almost in a 'stream-of-conciousness' mode as told by a third person. I found this to be true of Conrad's 'Nostromo' as well and have to admit that I failed to finish either book because of the cumbersome writing style. Perhaps, I am not smart enough to understand the writing style. In any case, may advice is to watch the movie which I found to be much more enjoyable.

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.

I had heard of Joseph Conrad but had not studied him or paid any particular attention to his work. Then I saw a reference to Joseph Conrad by a modern iconic author. So I decided to study his work. I have read some of his short stories, then Almayer's Folly, and Heart of Darkness in that order. I have to admit I thought Joseph Conrad was good, but not great. Then I read Lord Jim. I found this to be an elegant and gripping story. It mixes high adventure with a morality story. I was enthralled. I have seen this on various lists of so called "greatest novels". I completely agree that it is a work of that stature.

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.

Jim is a handsome young mate on the Patna, a steamship carrying pilgrims to Mecca. Thinking that the ship is going to sink, Jim and other crew members abandon it. The crew is rescued. The Patna and its passengers are also saved and the perfidy of the crew is thus exposed. Jim is shamed, both by the public board of inquiry into the incident, and because of his failure to act heroically. At the trial, Jim meets Charles Marlow, a sea captain, who narrates this story and becomes involved in Jim's life after the trial.

Jim can never escape the fact of the Patna. Jim changes employment whenever knowledge of the event and his involvement in it overtakes him. Eventually, Jim endeavours to start a new life in a remote island community and ultimately fills his heroic destiny in death.

Marlow's involvement in Jim's story is complex. He meets Jim at the trial, tries to piece his story together and then recounts it to acquaintances as an exchange of yarns. However, at the time of Marlow's recounting, Jim's story is not yet complete. The telling of the ending is in a manuscript to one of those who heard the story initially.

It seems to me that this novel is very much about the significance, and the tragedy, of human life. Jim cannot change the fact of his involvement in the Patna, and he cannot escape from it. Nor is Jim apparently able to seek or accept any form of redemption. I am not convinced, really, that he is redeemed in death. I may change my mind.

I am looking forward to reading other novels by Conrad and rereading this one.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

Looking for a ripping yarn about the sea? Don't look here. Conrad seems to go out of his way to limit suspense. He also gives us a protagonist we only know through layers of filtering. He also gives us a rather anti-heroic view of the world. NOT the formula of a bestseller. But that's not what he's trying to do.

Contrary to popular opinion, I don't think Lord Jim is about struggling with guilt; it's about struggling with the thought that we don't matter one way or the other.

Jim jumps ship and all the passengers live anyway. Jim stays on his island to protect his people and many of them die anyway.

Jim can't save the day. Could he even ruin the day if he tried? Does one individual simply not mean much in the complex web of human events which seem ruled by fluke occurrences more than our Honor, Courage, and Duty? Are those romantic ideals like Stein's beautiful butterflies: only good after we've shot them and placed them in cages to admire in a purely clinical way? Jim can't shoot his butterflies and therefore he can't participate in this fallen world for very long.

This book is also an attack on imperialism, it would seem. The natives' willing servitude to the white man rests less with the white man's superior intelligence and courage than with their misplaced idealizing of him. They worship Jim for a while because they just don't know him well enough yet. And not knowing people well enough yet is the very foundation imperialism is built upon.

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.

Lord Jim turned out to be one of the best novels I have read, and I admit around page 180, for the first time I can remember, I was considering not finishing a novel I had started. The first novel I read by Joseph Conrad was Heart of Darkness, which was narrated by Marlow. Lord Jim is also narrated by Marlow, which was an interesting twist. However, it also made the first 180 pages difficult to follow. Instead of reading a story, a story is being told to the reader. But the book is composed of two parts: Marlow telling us the introduction, and Marlow's letter to one who also heard the story the night Marlow told it. I felt this added something to the novel, making it more thrilling. The last 60-80 pages flew by, the conclusion was exciting, and then it was over. I have read three of Conrad's novels, and I like how he finishes them.
What happens. Jim is a sailor who dreams of glory, but falters in his first trial. He spends time trying to avoid his past and eventually finds himself the guardian of a people in remote India. When trouble seeks him again, he makes a decision with horrible consequences. But instead of running from the consequences as he had earlier in his life, he faces them. An amazing novel.

Joseph Conrad's tale of Lord Jim is a warning against taking yourself too seriously, expecting too much of yourself, failing to forgive yourself.

Jim is such a noble character but is he just another manifestation of Dostoevsky's 'The Idiot' - too honourable to be a survivor. Of course Conrad conspires greatly against Jim. With Jim's first great mistake - the one that, in his eyes, blighted him forever, it is as if God himself pardoned Jim, absolved him of any blame because there were no victims. And yet Jim cannot put the unfortunate aside push on with an effective life. But that's not quite true - eventually he does find a place for himself and the rest was up to Conrad's masterful plotting.

I also enjoy immensely the method Conrad uses of telling a tale through the eyes of an observer - Marlowe. While we are all participants in life, we are also very much more observers - if we care to observe.

other recommendations:

'Victory', 'Chance' - Joseph Conrad
'Virgin Soil' - Turgenev

You have to read till the end of this book, and experience Conrad's utterly masterful craftsmanship of each part of the story, to fully appreciate what a phenomenal piece of work this is. To Conrad, English was his third language, which he didn't begin to speak until he had become a young man, but it is hard to think of someone who was capable of writing more beautiful prose in English. Sure, in this book, the meaning of some of his sentences are, here and there, hard to fathom, which, I think H.L. Mencken suggested, had something to do with English not being his first language. There are, of course, other imperfections in the book. But Conrad's ability to make the scenes he describes seem very real, to make them come alive for the reader, is extraordinary. His description in the last portion of the book,of the physical scenery as well as the danger and emotional tumult of life in the remote Indonesian or Malaysian community of which Jim becomes leader, must rank near the very top of the best writing in the history of fiction.

Conrad's style may be difficult but what he says is oh so interesting.
Lord Jim is an idealistic young Englishman who pictures himself as a hero,yet in his first real test he is dissapointed in his own actions.
In his first job as first mate on a ship transporting muslim pilgrims to their Holy Land, Jim is confronted with a predicament in which he is unable to act heroically. The ship collides with something in calm waters and is in imminent danger of sinking. Much to Jim's dismay the Captain and crew decide to abandon ship leaving the pilgrims to fend for themselves. Jim does what he can but in an impulsive moment of terror finds himslef jumping from the ship to save himself. Incredibly the ship does not sink and the passengers are rescued by another ship.
Rather than run away from his responsibilities like the ship's captain. Jim answers the charges of the maritime review board. At the inquiry, Jim becomes aware of the presence of Marlowe, the story teller in 'The Heart of Darkness'.
Marlowe recognizes something honorable in Jim and becomes interested in Jim's well being. The court ruling forbiding Jim to officer another ship for the rest of his life is not nearly as harsh as Jim's own self incrimination.
Marlowe assists Jim in finding work as "water clerk" and Jim drifts around the South Seas, never staying very long in one place. Marlowe persuades an old merchant friend to hire Jim to manage one of the remote trading posts that he owns. Jim is dispatched to an island in Malaysia to releive another man who is dishonest. Jim encounters an island that is rife with political strife and warring native tribes.
Jim organizes the people to stand up to a tyrant theif who was terrorizing them. Because of his leadership and heroic actions, Jim is deified by the people. Jim befriends the chief's son, Dain Varis and falls in love witha eurasian girl who is the step daughter of Cornelius, the theif who preceeded Jim as the manager of the trading post.
Jim regains a part of his own self esteem but is once again put to the test when pirates invade the island. The pirates persuade Jim to let them leave the island without harm. Aided by Cornelius, the pirates leave the island only after they savagely kill several islanders, including Jim's best friend. Rather than leave the island, Jim confronts the greiving chieftan who blames Jim for the death of his son. By doing so Jim achieves his own heroic end.

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.

This is the fifth book I have read by Conrad, and through these readings I have come to deeply appreciate his literary power and the perfection of his stories. Conrad has the skill to border about several similar subjects, without repeating himself. "Lord Jim" is truly a Shakespearean tragedy, mainly because of the Shakespearean nature of the main character. Jim is a young naval officer with high hopes of heroism and moral superiority, but when he faces his first test of courage, he miserably fails. While 800 Muslim pilgrims are asleep aboard the ship "Patna", Jim discovers that the boat is about to sink. There are not sufficient lifeboats for everybody. Should he wake them up or not? He gets paralyzed with fear and then sudenly jumps into a boat being set up by the rest of the officers. He is taken to trial and disposessed of his working licence.
Ashamed and humiliated, Jim dedicates the rest of his life to two things: escape the memory of that fateful night, and redeem himself. This agonizing quest to recover his dignity in front of his own eyes leads him to hide in a very remote point in the Malayan peninsula, where he will become the hero, the strong man, the wise protector of underdeveloped, humble and ignorant people. Jim finds not only the love of his people, but also the love of a woman who admires him and fears the day when he might leave for good. The narrator, Captain Marlow (the same of "Heart of Darkness") talks to Jim for the last time in his remote refuge, and then Jim tells him that he has redeemed himself by becoming the people's protector. Oh, but these things are never easy and Jim will face again the specter of failure.
Conrad has achieved a great thing by transforming the "novel of adventures" into the setting for profound and interesting reflections on the moral stature of Man, on courage, guilt, responsibility, and redemption.
Just as in "Heart of Darkness" the question is what kinds of beings we are stripped of cultural, moral and religious conventions; just as in "Nostromo" the trustworthiness of a supposedly honest man is tested by temptation, in "Lord Jim" the central subject is dignity and redemption after failure.
A great book by one of the best writers.

The story of Jim was very interesting, and I especially enjoyed the method the author used to begin the story. However, Conrad is so hard to read. He is constantly changing points in time, sometimes in the middle of a paragraph. It's slow going, but I felt the novel was worth the effort.

"Her vigilant affection had an intensity that made it almost perceptible to the senses; it seemed actually to exist in the ambient matter of space, to envelop him like a peculiar fragrance, to dwell in the sunshine like a tremulous, subdued, and impassioned note."

LORD JIM is the story of an ordinary man who commits what may or may not be an act of cowardice and spends the rest of his life trying to atone for his sin. What makes this story extraordinary is the difficulty the reader has assessing the nature of the original act and then judging whether Jim has been punished enough. Joseph Conrad does not make it easy to gauge accurately either the man or his act since we can see the act filtered only through the lens of a narrator who is too close to the case to be judged reliable.

LORD JIM is a novel of adventure and many read it on that basis, but lurking beneath the surface of a simple act is, as in so much of Conrad's fiction, a bewildering complexity of issues that tap into the deepest recesses of why people do what they do and how others can fairly judge them. Marlow is the narrator who attends the trial of a crewman Jim accused of abandoning his ship during a storm when he thought it was sinking. When all the ship's officers leap into a lifeboat they abandon the more than eight hundred passengers below decks. Jim joins them, and all are later picked up by a French trawler only to learn that their ship did not sink and in fact was safely towed to port. All the officers, except Jim, escape punishment either by running away or pleading illness. Only Jim decides to speak out publicly in his defense, but of course there is none, so he is found guilty and stripped of his seaman's certificate as punishment. Marlow sees the trial and decides to follow Jim around the world to get the truth. These are the bald facts, but what Conrad does with them is to invest them with emotional and psychological issues that resist easy analysis.

To begin with, Conrad emphasizes Jim's ordinary state of being, by repeating that Jim is "one of us." This statement occurs so often that it becomes a mantra, inviting speculation as to what sense he is one of us. Whoever the "us" is, Conrad implies that the "us" must have had a standard of justice in which one size fits all. No one at the board of inquiry seems particularly upset that Jim was merely following the captain's orders to abandon ship nor that his record was otherwise flawless. The board judged Jim by an inflexible code of honor and found him wanting. Conrad, in his description of Jim as a maritime Everyman (no first name, a flat character who no past, present, and now no future), makes it easy to condemn the board's overhasty verdict to condemn Jim for an act that had mitigating circumstances. As Marlow gets to know Jim, he acknowledges that the more he knows, the less he understands. Conrad sets up a straw man in Jim. Because so many people, including Marlow, hold Jim under so many lenses, the images that result are often contradictory. The only constant is Jim himself. During the trial, and later during the climactic encounter with the natives who call him Lord Jim, Jim continues to attempt to see himself in the simplest manner possible. He knows that he cannot possibly be all the Jims floating on everyone's lips, so he determines to be the Jim who should have stayed on board the deck of a sinking ship. This Jim is willing to take responsibility for his actions. When he unwisely allows the dastardly Gentleman Brown to escape his richly deserved fate, he makes a colossal leap of faith: he will pay now for all sins of his past. In his death, Conrad suggests that this leap of faith may be the only trait that distinguishes reprobates like Brown from ordinary men like Jim who may not be so ordinary after all.

After watching the film version, (which I'm ambivalent about) I ordered this book, and re-discovered Conrad. This is a powerful story about the romanticism of youth and then the subsequent disillusionment of experience that life is, and with Lord Jim, a bitter twist of fate. As one gets older, one sees how quickly life can change. One minute you are secure, the next your world is upside down, as momentous as change can be, humans are equal to the task of adapting. Does Jim adapt or run from change? Conrad will take us on a life's journey to show us some different answers to this question.

A very worthwhile read and one that should be made if you are old enough to remember that is not the first recession.

PS - This is a first rate edition!

A Grand Ungodly Godlike Narrator, November 22, 2008
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 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.

Often found in college English curricula, LORD JIM has been reviewed a huge number of times. I doubt if I can say anything entirely original. Jim is a young Englishman serving as a mate on a rust-bucket of a ship plying between Asia and Arabia, delivering pilgrims to the haj. The ship hits something mid-ocean. The five white officers, realizing the poor condition of their vessel, panic and abandon ship. One dies of a heart attack in the process. The other four are picked up and brought to Aden where they learn that the ship had not sunk. They are tried for cowardice and "behavior unbecoming..." and their sailor's papers are taken away. The story is narrated, over a period of time, by a man named Marlow, who believes that Jim had acted without thought, without gathering his mental resources as it were, and was capable of far better despite this momentary lapse. He follows Jim over the years and relates the events of Jim's life. The young sailor runs from port to port, escaping his past, before arriving as a trader and agent in a forgotten (and fictitious) Indonesian port. He takes over as virtual leader of a jungle rajadom, balancing the forces of Malay ruler and Bugis immigrant power, earning the love of the common people, protecting them from outside chaos. At last a boatload of criminal renegades of many races turns up--the scum of the seas, as the term goes---and Jim faces the resulting crisis. Not wishing to give everything away, I will not continue with the story, but suffice to say that Jim redeems himself. A Christ-like figure, he takes responsibility for the sins of others, as well as owns up to his own mistake. If this book is about anything, it is about the possibility of redemption. Maybe Jim should have forgotten about his past as he struggled around the ports of Asia before winding up in Patusan, but Conrad constructs another of his deep psychological studies; this one of a man haunted by his past. Jim cannot rid himself of the guilt over his previous behavior. Thus, his final act is the one most necessary to achieve final redemption.

LORD JIM is a classic novel for a good reason. It is constructed magnificently. Description, tension, plot, and important ideas about human nature all play their parts. Though Conrad's verbosity may wear on modern readers---he never says anything in five words if he can use fifty---there will be no doubt in your mind that Conrad was one of the greatest writers in the English language.

Joseph Conrad's "Lord Jim" is among the very best of the modern novels. It presents a powerful and compelling story in straightforward narrative which finally brings the reader face to with a great struggle between life and death or good and evil. This is an exceedingly great work of fiction which will be read and enjoyed here as long a civilized men reside on the earth. If you are looking for a warm, fuzzy, feel-good story, then read something else.
Buy it and start reading today.
Enjoy.

Timothy E. Kennelly

If you haven't read this since high school or college, you might want to give it another try. I loved this book back then, but picked it up just recently, maybe wanting to connect with an old friend. Well, what a ride. I somehow wasn't tuned in back in my teens and 20s to how funny many of "Marlowe's" insights, narratives and commentaries are. Those and others more serious and poetic will have you saying "so true" to yourself about Conrad's perceptions of certainly the male half of this world....what a global village he describes, too, back then. And Marlowe's concern for Jim takes on more emotional weight now that I'm reading it some decades on, and have a son of my own. Anyway, might be time to put all the professorial interpretations aside and just enjoy this tale.

This story of redemption, is as powerful a story as you will ever find. By Conrad, whose Heart of Darkness became Apocalypse Now, you can depend on great writing and epic story-lines. Lord Jim is no exception. Lots of action, adventure, villains, arms dealers, smugglers, high seas and romance too, and battles with many clever tactics, sounds like a book just for men...but its not just an adventure...its about the choices each of us make in our hearts, in the quite place of our mind, and how we react to it....and when we make mistakes, what we do about them.

This is what makes Lord Jim a necessary read. This is profound stuff!

Enjoy this wonderful book, I did on many levels!

This is the central question explored by Conrad in Lord Jim. Jim is ultimately a character who inspires our sympathy due to his inability to find reconcilliation for his one tragic moment of weakness. In him we find a person of tremendous potential that remains unrealized as the tragic circumstances of his abandoning his post aboard the Patna continually haunt him and the associated guilt drives him to isolation.
Conrad successfully explores the concepts of bravery, cowardice,guilt and the alternative destinies that an individual may be driven to by these qualities.
The narrative can be a bit confusing at times as Marlowe relates the tale by recalling his encounters with Jim. The book reminded very much of Somerset Maugham's THE RAZOR"S EDGE" in style. However I believe that Maugham did a much better job of incorporating the narrator into the flow of the story. Overall LORD JIM is a wonderful classic novel that I highly recommend.

After reading this tale about a young man who lost his honour, and who spends the rest of his life trying to reclaim that honour, I felt sad. This is a sad story about a man that we know only as Jim. Jim committed an act of cowardice when he was a mate on a ship. He was only nineteen years of age, and he made a decision to abandon what he thought was a sinking ship and he leaves about 800 passengers to face their fate alone. He can never forgive himself for this, and he personally exiles himself from his own family back in England. This may sound a bit melodramatic, but the book is not. It is beautifully written, rich, evocative and compelling. We see the type of man that Jim becomes as he's trying to get over this big mistake. He appears to be a strong and decisive man but we the readers get glimpses of the chinks in his armour. Until his final ignominious fall - What a waste of a man's life, and what a great story!

Published in 1900, this story by British contemporary of Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, is a little hard to read. It is "Literature" (though opinion is divided as to its value) because there is much more going on that just a series of events. Like the Stallone movie "Cliffhanger", the central character is traumatized by an incident when he lost his nerve and abandoned ship. An assignment many guilt-ridden years later gives Jim a chance to redeem himself.
There are several factors that make this famous novel hard to read: the old-fashioned morals (white man superiority, social acceptability, duty), descriptions of "the mysterious East", and the use of a narrator (Marlow, no, not the Humphrey Bogart character). At first I found it hard to take Jim's guilt-tripping seriously. The narrator, Marlow, is telling the story to a group of friends at a house one evening after dinner. Although these friends do not figure in the story, we see the glow of their cigars in the dark, and they act as foils for Marlow's narrative: he has to not only tell them the story but also explain how he felt about Jim and why he decided to try and help him. They in turn, together with other characters Marlow meets, comment on Jim. Using Marlow as a narrator also helps to delay the reader's discovery of what actually happened on board the "Patna". At the end, even the physical Marlow fades away, and the final details of what actually happened to Jim are given in a letter from Marlow to a "privileged reader", and are made up of what Marlow gleaned from a number of different sources, including the girl Jewel and Jim's manservant/bodyguard Tamb' Itam. The long drawn-out descriptions and the indirect narration allows the reader to ponder what is going on in Jim's mind, and in Marlow's. Although a modern reader will not agree or even understand what Jim did, the mysteries within the human heart remain as fascinating and as unfathomable as ever. How will we act in an emergency: stick to our duty, or save ourselves? And how would we deal with the feelings of guilt or inadequacy? Jim firmly believes that he would do his duty, and never comes to terms with the fact that he saved himself.
All this makes for a challenging read. This story reminded me of Kipling's descriptions of "the far-flung corners of Empire", of Somerset Maugham's stories of the Far East (especially "Before the Party", a traumatic incident recalled), and of Flaubert's "Madame Bovary", that ironic description of a life ruined by the romantic ideals of the day.

This is one of those books that anybody who has been throughhigh school should have been exposed (or at least exposed to the CliffNotes on the novel). I remember being assigned this book as a junior or senior and bluffing my way through without really reading it. I even got a literature degree without reading it. Finally, after many years, I felt that I should give the novel its due, and picked up a copy.
The novel is the story of Jim, an overly romantic seaman, who during a moment of crisis loses his courage. He is first mate on a pilgrim ship bound for Mecca and after the ship collides with an unseen object and is in danger of sinking, he abandons ship leaving the human cargo to fend for its own. He is dogged by his guilt and spends years drifting around the East trying to find the right occasion by which he might redeem himself. Eventually he ends up in the forests of Malaysia where he becomes a god-like protector of the indigenous people and is given the title of "Lord." But no matter how successful Jim might appear to his followers, and to the omnipresent narrator of the novel, he still cannot forget his moment of weakness. Jim's self-centeredness prevents him from moving forward with his life and condemns him to a life of voluntary exile, all the time proclaiming that he is not good enough to live in the outside world. He is willing to risk all future happiness and fortune to be able to face his demons once again without losing his nerves. Ironically, it is his last "heroic" act that destroys all the good that Jim has painstakingly built up, essentially bringing chaos to his Eden like world.
Published at the very beginning of the twentieth century, Lord Jim, in many ways anticipated the experimental writing techniques that would be brought to fruition in the works of Joyce, Faulkner, and others. Conrad is not only interested in telling a tale, he is interested in different points of view, nonlinear narrative techniques, and solving the complexities inherent in a "tale within a tale" formula. Although some readers might find Conrad's prose a little tedious, perseverence and careful reading will reveal passages of unexpected beauty that will cause the reader to pause -- then slowly re-read.

Lord Jim is classic Conrad. Beguiling, exotic, original, truthful and complex. Challenging the conventions of the 19th Century heroic seafaring narrative, Conrad's subtle tale of Jim, a lookout who jumps ship in mysterious circumstances, and eventually redeems himself in similarly distorted conditions, allows the reader to consider notions of honour and heroism afresh. Jim is a man who longs for the heroic, in keeping with his times, but is found wanting, and is disgraced. Following an inquiry he is cast into exile and spends the following years on a path to redemption, his cause tracked by the inquisitive narrator Marlow who finds fascination in Jim's plight. The final chapters of the novel are arguably a little too convoluted and shrouded in a musk of exotic far eastern adventure, but they do weave a captivating tale of a man who may not be able to live according to his high principles, but he can at least die for them.

I did not expect to enjoy this book, and it took a little while to get into it, but I found myself enthralled--and by the conclusion, moved--almost against my will.

Conrad's style here is a bit moody for my personal taste, but beautiful nonetheless. He makes brilliant use of the English language and is a master of the judicious metaphor. He draws you in as he slowly unravels his tale of an "overly romantic" man and his "exquisite egoism."

While Conrad doesn't quite compare with the great romanticists like Hugo and Dostoevsky, Lord Jim is one of the last great romantic novels, certainly far superior to almost any fiction being written today.

I did not expect to enjoy this book, and it took a little while to get into it, but I found myself enthralled--and by the conclusion, moved--almost against my will.

Conrad's style here is a bit moody for my personal taste, but beautiful nonetheless. He makes brilliant use of the English language and is a master of the judicious metaphor. He draws you in as he slowly unravels his tale of an "overly romantic" man and his "exquisite egoism."

While Conrad doesn't quite compare with the great romanticists like Hugo and Dostoevsky, Lord Jim is one of the last great romantic novels, certainly far superior to almost any fiction being written today.

This is a gem of a novel by Conrad.The core of all is the relationship between Jim feelings of guiltness and the reality surrounding him.Every attempt to reach redemption by Jim is constantly frustated by his own unforgiviness toward himself that in the end leads him to a noble but senseless death.It seems that Conrad suggests to us that reaching perfection is less important than learn to accept ourselves as we are.Nature and society in Conrad vision are terrible forces totally indifferent of individual feelings.What is left to man in this doomed struggle is a kind of heroicity in going on the same.The novel is also masterful in the use of a narrator voice which permits to assist to the developement of the tale from an "external" but personal point of view.The writing style of Conrad is very powerful and fascinating .5 stars for this terrific novel!

I did not expect to enjoy this book, and it took a little while to get into it, but I found myself enthralled--and by the conclusion, moved--almost against my will.

Conrad's style here is a bit moody for my personal taste, but beautiful nonetheless. He makes brilliant use of the English language and is a master of the judicious metaphor. He draws you in as he slowly unravels his tale of an "overly romantic" man and his "exquisite egoism."

While Conrad doesn't quite compare with the great romanticists like Hugo and Dostoevsky, Lord Jim is one of the last great romantic novels, certainly far superior to almost any fiction being written today.

If you have already listened to Ackland's reading of 'Heart of Darkness' you might suspect that it would be impossible for a rendition of a lesser-known work to live up to the impossibly high standards that the extrraordinary combination of writer and reader had set.
Let me put your mind at rest, this is, perhaps to my own surprise, if anything, even better still.
Ackland makes Conrad's character's voices entirely his own.
The words spring to life and build pictures so vividly that TV, movies and even real life experience are all made to seem less memorable and compelling.
The emotions and thoughts of the characters seem so convincing that to reflect upon the fact that this is fiction whilst you are listening to it, is to entertain the unimaginable.
Like certain collections of music, the recording is unimpaired by endless replaying.
If I could only ever have one audio book, it would be this one.

Reading Joseph Conrad is a true pleasure. His mastery of the language is unparalleled and his sentence structures, although at times dense, as often approach pure poetry. This is even more astounding given the fact that English is a second language for him. This is the story of an untested young English sailor, Jim, who has visualized himself as a man honor and bravery. When he fails miserably at the very first test of his courage, it alters all aspects of his life and his views of himself. Conrad takes us through an intricate retelling of his tale, from the point of his failure forward, through a third party, Marlow - an older sailor who befriends him.

This is a richly-woven story of redemption as told by a third person, Marlow. The tale has exciting high points but, honestly, you do have to struggle with the text to see this book through to the end. It ain't easy.

Now that my struggle is over, I am still trying to figure out why Marlow is so infatuated with Jim. And, why is the group of men smoking cigars on the verandah listening so intently and for so long to Marlow's long-winded story?

Sure, the story of Jim is interesting. It explores classic themes of honor and courage. Jim is definitely a headstrong figure. To a point. But I actually found Marlow to be the more engaging character in an odd sort of way.

Why?

Well, it seems from his commentary that Marlow has more or less dedicated his life to following Jim's exploits around the South Seas. It's not normal. I can understand everything Jim does but I can understand very little of what Marlow does. What is his raison d'etre?

Marlow also keeps referring to Jim as "one of us" as if Marlow's life is somehow comparable to Jim's.

I am interested to know what the heck Marlow has done to include himself in the company of a great man like Jim! Is Marlow, too, keeping a dark and hurtful secret buried deep within his breast? Which begs the question: what secret does Conrad himself hold tight? After all, Marlow is supposed to be his alter ego.

But that would make Jim Conrad's alter ego's alter ego. Ah, forget-about-it!

Just read the book...its a good one!

Each one of us has a personal "ideal"...each different in its contours and each varying in its influence on our actions. For the most part, the ideal is hazy and evolving but there are elements which are distinct and rigid...and a compromise on these core principles strikes at the very root of a person's self concept. Most of us are fortunately flexible enough to "adjust" and carry on. For a few, however, the failure to adhere to one's own ideal is as good as a death sentence. Lord Jim is the extraordinary tale of one such extraordinary person.
For me the most interesting character of the novel is the narrator himself. Jim is the focal point, of course, and an exceptional character, but quite predictable. The drama of Jim's life after the incident on the Patna is really orchestrated by Marlowe who recognizes the inevitable doom of his friend even as he tries everything in his power to stall it. It is doubtful whether he really wanted to succeed - It is clear at many points in the narrative, that Marlowe was unable to sign off on Jim's character certificate, even in his conversations with others. He represents, in a way, the conscience of the "western world" - the conscience Jim betrays and attempts to flee from. Jim recognizes that and so does Marlowe...but he also loves Jim...so the dilemma is really his - should he allow his friend to redeem his honour in the only acceptable manner or should he prolong Jim's onerous journey through an unforgiving life by creating an illusion of redemption, which he probably knew Jim's stint in Patusan would. He is, therefore, equally a party to the betrayal and Jim's fatal purging is also, to an extent, his own.
A wonderful book and a subject equal to Conrad's literary class. The only thing that left a bad taste was the implied superiority of the Westerner's ethics and character. I guess it has to be judged in the context of a period when the "sun never set on the British Empire".
Vijay

There is no doubt that Conrad is one of the master writers of the previous century, however I tend to find him rather a chore to read. Not that reading is supposed to be "easy" of course, but that's just by way of a warning. In this novel, he not only embarks on epic page-long sentences, but engages in a whole range of innovative (for the time) techniques for telling the tragic tale of Tuan/Lord Jim. These techniques include abrupt shifts and jumps in time, and a great deal story within a story constructions. The bulk of the story is recounted by a seaman named Marlow (who also was narrator for Heart of Darkness), who is often retelling what he heard from another source, or even third-hand. Some may find this a little confusing at first, but it shouldn't be a surprising device for the modern reader. Technique aside, this is an exceedingly dense work, rich in lengthy descriptions, and requiring the reader's utmost attention.
Jim is a well-bred young Englishman who takes to the sea, envisioning a series of adventures in which he will prove his mettle and emerge as a well-regarded man. Alas, when a ship carrying a load of Malay pilgrims to Mecca strikes something and seems destined to sink, and his senior officers all abandon ship without rousing the passengers, he experiences fear and abandons ship as well. But when the ship doesn't sink, Jim is the only crewman to step forward and present himself to the maritime court of inquiry, which strips him of his sailing papers. Thereafter, Jim knocks around the South Seas, working as a water clerk in various ports, and departing whenever someone recognizes him. Finally, the narrator Marlow arranges for Jim to be installed as manager of a remote Malaysian trading post. There, he becomes the ruler and protector of the native people.
The story is not really of importance though; really, we are meant to be taking a long and careful look at the character of Jim. Some may find him to be a tragic and romantic figure, however I view him as the embodiment of self-absorption and pride. Jim's vision of himself as a brave and true fellow is so key to his ego that he literally can't face his own past actions, even though they are utterly understandable and human. And far from seeking to prove or redeem himself, he seeks to remove himself from the sight of anyone who might recognize him. His self-imposed exile among the Malays allows him to fulfill his dream of being an respected leader, and allows him to avoid introspection. Indeed, had he been even slightly introspective, he might have eventually recognized that his overwhelming adherence to a code of honor has not served him particularly well. Ironically (or maybe predictably), at the end of it all, his misguided sense of honor brings death to him, and destruction to his people. It's not too hard to figure out what Conrad, who spend several decades on the high seas, thought of this ideal of honor. One character gives voice to Conrad's views, by saying that Jim died for "a shred of meaningless honor".

We studied this book in a college literature class and I couldn't wait to finish it - author Joseph Conrad's thick writing made reading this book a real chore. Still, the story contains a decent plot and interesting main character. Lord Jim is an adventurous and charismatic young British sailor who survives a ship disaster in Asian waters, and finds himself blamed for the mishap. Stripped of his seaman's card, he must deal with overwhelming guilt while also seeking full or at least partial redemption. He ends up moving to the remote corners of the Malayan peninsula, where he becomes a trusted protector and helper of underdeveloped natives. Sound interesting? If you don't mind books written in a sluggish Victorian style, you'll probably enjoy LORD JIM. If you demand readability, go elsewhere.

Young Jim, ( his last name is never given) is guilty of dereliction of duty and pays the price.
Set adrift with no prospects, he is befriended by a older father figure who helps him start a
new life on a remote island. There he rises to become Lord Jim. The story begins and ends
on this island. A masterwork of much insight. The language can be slightly off-putting but
reading this book with sparknotes makes it accesible.

When I read Lord Jim for the first time as a teenager I found it boring. Many years later I now find it an amazing book. Conrad himself spent sixteen years at sea in the late 1800s, so this book is to some degree autobiographical. The version of this book that I have even quotes Conrad: "Every novel contains an element of autobiography." In this book, the protagonist, Jim, travels to a remote region of the world, far from Victorian England. In this sense, the plot is similar to that in one of Conrad's other famous works, Heart of Darkness. Other than that book, I'm not familiar with Conrad's other works, nor am I an expert in Victorian literature, so I can't place this in its proper historical context. However, it seems like an amazingly well written story in and of itself. Author of Adjust Your Brain: A Practical Theory for Maximizing Mental Health.

Just by coincidence- Conrad real name was Józef Konrad Korzeniowski, Polish noble man, man who left his country not for England but for the sea. He never managed to speak real fluent English- contrary to his written skills.
He has never been given the full repect he deserved- neither in the UK nor in Poland, his home country. He wrote in English but his way of thinking was Polish- romantic. He was- he is- one of the best writers in the whole Western worlds.If there is any books one shall read it is Lord Jim- showing how great and how humble human being is- in every respect.

There should be a Joseph Conrad revival. How this man could write! No less than H. L. Menken, the great critic, essayist, and scholar (of "The American Language"), of the first quarter of the twentieth Century, said of him: "He was the greatest artist who ever wrote a novel".

Most know of Conrad's Polish origin -- upper middle-class -- Polish being his first language; and that he learned and wrote exquisitely in English.

The first part of his life, he spent at sea, working up from seaman to mates, to skipper, in both steam and sail; and the latter part in writing fiction about it all. He was so good, Ford Maddox Ford wanted to collaborate with him, and did.

His "Lord Jim" was emblematic of the White man's superiority -- although Conrad doesn't hammer at it.

Jim, presented by Conrad as being in his mid-twenties, was white in everything, including white garb and blond of hair color. And more than once Conrad uses the expression in referring to him that, "He was one of us". The context here being that he was a white, educated, upper middle-class, Christian, heterosexual, and central European -- in this case English. That is we, who more than any other, ventured out in commercial enterprise and curiosity and hooked the world together.

This high adventure tale, "Lord Jim", is woven by Conrad in a non-linear way, with many back cuts and forward cuts, and jarring story surprises that the author has masterfully teased us with. In the first half Jim gets into some quite serious life difficulty and the second half deals with his redemption.

This is one of Conrad's "up river" stories, and in this case Jim becomes "Yuan Jim" or Lord Jim to the river people for his bravery, great character and great competence. It shows that this white man from Europe has what it takes to straighten things out among the native Javanese. But Conrad is not Eurocentric here as some of his admirable characters are Indonesians; and of his most despicable, one is a Portuguese. Conrad weighs fairly all races and ethnicities that he has come across and writes about. There is also an interestingly and originally developed "love angle" in this story.

In his other yarns as well, such as Heart of Darkness, The Secret Sharer, Youth, Nostromo, etc., Conrad is not only superb at plot architecture and structure, but at character development as well as conveying the mood of the ambience; and in doing all this with the most striking and sublime -- not necessarily economical -- language.

But the most important element in his writing is elusive, is often just beneath the situational surface, and is a profound one. It sometimes seems the action of his high adventure tales may be, in part, a vehicle for conveying in a symbolic way the conflicts of the broader human condition with fate and the resolution of those.

This book is so powerful, it had me thinking for days and weeks after reading it. The more I thought about it, the more things I came to discover. One thing you should ask yourself is whether or not Conrad approves of Jim's actions throughout the book, after the Patna incident. Is it worth giving up everything to regain your honour? And is Jim's end really a tryumph? I beg to differ. In fact, I came to the conclusion that Conrad couldn't have approved of Jim's actions (after the Patna incident). (Marlow comments at the end of the book: "He goes away from a living woman to celebrate his pitiless wedding with a shadowy ideal of conduct.") What will confuse many readers is that Marlow appears both as the narrator and as a character in the book. As the narrator, Marlow does not approve of what Jim is doing to himself, and finds the whole idea of honour overrated. On the other hand Marlow-the character does nothing but -contribute- to Jim's destruction. It's quite puzzling to see him in the role of Jim's friend when he does nothing to help Jim spiritually, to bring him back on the right track. He sees Jim torment himself like that and what does he do? At some point he comments: "for a second I wished heartily that the only course left open for me was to pay for his <Jim's> funeral". Umm, ya, that's a nice friend... By no means will anybody get me to believe that Jim's end is positive, a tryumph over death, the solution to his problem... because it isn't. It isn't 'normal' for a young man to suffer like that, it is not 'normal' for a young man to see death as his only solution. He had his whole life ahead of him and enough opportunities left to regain his honour, even after the pilgrim episode. IMHO. I'd be glad to see more reviews, 'hear' more comments on this.

(...)Conrad knows how to tell a story and few have ever been told as well as this one. Lord Jim the character is very appealing but also appealing are the sea and island settings that Conrad describes so well. Those hard to resist settings as well as the tale itself populated by a host of memorable minor characters all conspire to make this an irresistable yarn. It appeals as an adventure but there is plenty to capture the discerning substantive mind as well. Conrad offers a tale about a young man who wishes to be a hero.(...)

Lord Jim is the story of a young ship's officer who makes an inexplicable mistake. Branded a coward and stripped of his license as a sailor, Jim is unable to bear the stigma attached to his life for a brief moment of cowardice. Jim seeks redemption on a small Malay island, only to fail for what one of the characters calls, "...a shred of meaningless honor...". A truly great work of fiction, Lord Jim is linguistically an easier read than other of Conrad's sea works, but is just as deep. A must read.

Conrad, unlike most novelist, emphasizes the shortcomings of his heros. Lord Jim, a character of immense ability, comes to be defined by his failures. This is a monumental work of weakness, redemption, and ultimately, tragedy.

This is not a book for high school students. Teachers and administrators who assign it do their students a disservice. Stick to Heart of Darkness, which contains many of the same themes and literary merit, without what to high school students is over the top "wordiness." Lord Jim should be enjoyed at the individual's chosen time and pace.

The best book on the nature of courage I've ever read. Unfortunately, to appreciate it (and many other Conrad novels), you need to have a fair bit of experience in life. I tried to read Conrad at 13, then at 20. It seemed boring and I could not quite relate to his heroes, but now, when I am a bit older, I found his books and this one in particular, really interesting. This is not a page turner. I found myself reading pieces of 10-20 pages, then putting the book aside and taking some time to think. All in all, this is a really good book.

Everything in this book accords to its content and very message. Joseph Conrad's style, his sentence structure keeps in perfect beat with the events of the narrative. Despite contrary opinions, I hold that the lengthy sentences were the only way to deliver to the reader the full impact of what kind of man Jim was like; Conrad exposes every thought of the man and the emotion haunting it with terrfic and horrifying truth. This book stirred and inspired the romantic side of me, and devestated me whenever I was forced to realize that it was all hopless dreaming in the end. Above all, however, the very sense of honour (a virtue seemingly forgotten in today's culture, or perhaps only in America) in Jim gave me a universal truth and direction; this story of a man that is the truest of them all to himself is the most thought- invoking book I've ever read.
To all who are thinking of picking this book up- It is a rich and orientaled lilac egg, with a treasure of meat inside that can only be described as ambrosia to the last great men. It is a voyage on the mysterious and endless sea of black waters; and once the voyage has been finished, the truth of men will be held- if you're ready.

conrad creates wonderful worlds of adventure, mystery and exotic people and locations. in the case of lord jim, our main character remains a tormented enigma, much like kurtz in heart of darkness. conrad's method of detailing everything around our young, romantic jim causes us to be drawn in by the sheer lushness, then left to darkly ponder the nature of honor, self and redemption. still amazing reading a almost a century after it was written.

Maybe my expectations were too high. I had purchased a Modern Library hardcover copy of Lord Jim for myself at a second hand bookstore for my birthday. I was really looking forward to reading it. However I struggled to finish the book, which in my edition was 400 pages long. I normally don't have a problem with books that long, and so I can't say that this was the turn-off. So, what was it that disappointed me? I never really felt empathy for any of the characters. In my book if you are looking for a classic tale of moral failure and attempted restoration try Thomas Hardy's "The Mayor of Casterbridge" or Graham Greene's "The Power and the Glory".

A tale of standing up to one’s responsibilities and taking possession of the consequences for your actions.
The style of writing in the nineteenth century makes this somewhat of a difficult read. I could follow what Conrad is trying to say,but with some difficulty.

This is a fascinating book. Although it is difficult to understand, if one reads carefully and even discovers the basic plot, it is an incredibly rewarding experience. When I first read it I didn't know whether I should laugh or cry. I recommend this book to anyone who read Heart of Darkness and is interested in the further adventures of the philisopical and self-reflective Marlow. This is an awesome book.

"Lord Jim" is generally a fast-paced read (though there are definitely parts that seem slower and more drawn out) that illustrates many of the key facets of the Western fascination with adventure and exploration characteristic of 19th century imperialism.

I read this novel a few monthes ago, and its impact has persevered. Frankly, I am just as thrilled about it now as i was when i read the last words. The aspect of LORD JIM that captivated me the most was how, with certain scenes, Conrad managed with great description and other tools to conjure up an unbeatable mood. The images transplanted into my mind felt, not like a memory, but as if I was THERE, living it as well. Somehow, Conrad has managed to cut out an infinitely interesting slice of reality; life, which we are offered in this book. The characters themselves, indeed, are living people.
See for yourself.

Conrad is like a Zen Master, and while this book is not the shortest introduction to his beliefs, it is one of the most comprehensive. He shows the world as it must be to an idealist, as a sea of competing thoughts, with the highest being the heroic and self-negating that is also world-embracing. He shows how human beings suffer for not having this, and how they rise in their own estimation and thus are capable of great deeds when they have it. A good read for an airplane or other long ordeal, this book seems like rambling Victorian trash until you notice its multilayered symbolism.

This book was sitting on my shelf waiting to be read for years. I finally started got into it last week. Although just 320 pages, it is an expansive book. Joseph Conrad is known for Heart of Darkness, but Lord Jim is equally compelling. Some readers more accustomed to modern prose may find Conrad's prose, not to mention that of his contemporaries, too embellished. However, the plot is riveting, some passages truly poetic, and Conrad's study of the human condition profound.

Lord Jim is the novel of one man's fight against his own past and his attempt to prove himself to the world after he has made one terrible error. Like so many of books it is a story of the sea, although it is not a non-fiction story. The story opens with the fated voyage of a vessel, the ship of Eastern pilgrims which are Muslim with the ship called Patna, which Jim the head mate and the rest of the crew leave and abandon with its passengers still on board the Patna. Jim does not wish to act so shameful and dislike his actions but does so in the horror of the moment. Put on trial for his error the young idealistic Jim is stripped of his papers and is left to follow an existence avoiding his own identity and seeking mystery as he travels the entire world. Marlow organizes a meeting at which Jim goes to Patusan, a remote or ancient region. Jim brings order and strength to the area with his strength of character and leadership. The arrival of the two-faced Gentleman Brown shakes the peace Jim has created and his value systems are called into question before the horror of the ending. The horrors of the ending would be when the angry old man shoots Jim and falls dead.
I really did not like the novel because simply Jim had abandoned a bunch of Muslim pilgrims aboard a ship which he thought was sinking. Then he soon discovers that the ship is not sinking. After going to trial he escapes and goes to a remote. Jim in this part of the story he had done wrong escaping and not paying his consequences. That is basically why I think this novel isn't great. It would have been efficient if Jim had not escaped and to see what has happened.

Just after the first few pages I was already a little confused. I think just because I don't think I have ever read a book that was told in third person. Eventually you get used to it, and the fact that his descriptions of almost everything is both extremely detailed and long, perhaps a little too long. I think Conrad just wants us, the reader, to know exactly what is going on and to be focused on the story. Most of Jim's story is told by a fellow seaman(a captain) named Marlow who Jim met at a meeting where Jim loses his hopes and dreams of becoming a "hero of the sea".
Jim is a young man who has big plans to become a sea captian, but after pushing through the ranks and becoming chief mate he makes a bad mistake. The ship he was currently boarded, "the Patna", became damaged and without thinking Jim and the rest of the crew abandoned the ship leaving innocents stranded on the boat. This mistake costs Jim his life as a seaman. This is where he meets Marlow, who seems to take interest in Jim. Marlow assists Jim in finding a new way to live in Patusan, where people begin to look up to Jim as their leader.
In my opinion I don't really think we are suppose to think of the story as what is so great but looking at Jim the character as what is. I think Jim is a little to full of himself and everytime the memory of the Patna arises he hides in fear like a coward. He thinks he is superhuman for stopping a bandit in his little town. He needs to realize that heros are only in fairy tales.
I rated the book three stars because it was a good story, but the book for me was a little too confusing and way to long of a book to get the story he was telling across to everyone. Overall, if your looking for a something to do everynite before you go to sleep then I recommend this book to you.

Conrad has a wonderful writing style. He has a masterful way of stringing together events with an eloquent writing style. Not many could knit the two sections of this book together in a single story.

One of the best books I've ever read. Brilliantly written, this books tells the story of a young man struggling with guilt about his past. Demonstrates the impact of a single event on an individual's soul and life.

This novel is about a young British sailor who is disgraced when he panics and abandons an unseaworthy vessel loaded with passengers. The rest of his life is a struggle to redeem his lost honor in the Far East which gains him the love of the people he lives with, but also causes his death.

This novel requires undisturbed concentration, and rewards with a rich description of deeply moving moments. I read the book on a Gulf Coast barrier island, where I was escaping from personal strife. Lord Jim is a tragedy about the personal past becoming destiny, and how the past can destroy. This book woke me up; my life has changed. If only Conrad would lighten up for a few paragraphs occasionally...

I remember muddling through this book in High School. I was an avid reader and had no problems with any of the other reading we were assigned, but this one stood out as a real chore. I don't know if it was the Victorian writing style or what this book made me me want to poke my eyes out after a few chapters. The author creates a person so devoid of a sense of self that it is a relief when he dies in the end.

This is a fascinating book. Although it is difficult to understand, if one reads carefully and even discovers the basic plot, it is an incredibly rewarding experience. When I first read it I didn't know whether I should laugh or cry. I recommend this book to anyone who read Heart of Darkness and is interested in the further adventures of the philisopical and self-reflective Marlow. This is an awesome book.

Ugh. This might have been a good book if it were half the size, but Conrad strains to keep the plot going amid the endless descriptions of sea, sky, and the characters' states of mind. Move along, move along! This ancient icon may be a monument to Conrad's mastery of his second language, and it may be a tragic psychological exploration of the universal heroic destiny (or something equally dense), but listening to it doesn't exactly keep you on the edge of your seat.

A terrific examination of the human soul. The utter fraility of man, and his uncertainty of morality. I heard once that The Brothers Karamanzov was the only book you needed in life, but it's false. All you need is Lord Jim.

I ordered this book and two other Conrad books for my daughter who is in the U.S. Coast Guard. She really enjoyed them. The books arrived well before Christmas and in very good condition. I will continue to purchase books through the store. Thank you. Che & Lawrence Martini

I debated whether or not I should write a review. After all, I only read the first 70 pages or so, after which I decided to stop slogging through this tedious novel. However, since I assume most people who would buy and read this book are doing it for their own enjoyment, I felt complelled to chime in, although I'm clearly in the minority. However, I must add in my defense that this book was initially criticized by his contemporaries as a short story that just kept rambling on with no apparent purpose, a criticism I find valid.

The premise sounds fascinating - the journey of a young seaman who attempts to reconcile his dishonorable past. It sounded like it would be an interesting tale about the conflict between heroics and harsh reality. However, in the delivery of the story, I lost all interest shortly. The main problem I see is in the vivid descriptions and imagery. This, or course, is usually a good thing. However, Conrad seems to go into such great description of every little detail that it distracts from the main story. It seems that Conrad could have been just as effective by using half of the words. The non-sequitur narrative also makes it a bit more difficult to follow, although I think this could have been effective if the narrative would have been more concise and to the point.

However, rather than merely blasting away at "Lord Jim," I will at least give one alternative - "Heart of Darkness", also by Joseph Conrad. Read my take of this in my other reviews. This is a much more interesting and more enjoyable read than "Lord Jim", and about half its length. Plus, it offers a more poignant picture of Imperialism and its ideals (or lack thereof).

Perhaps I will give it another go in the future, but until then I would recommend you give "Lord Jim" a pass and spend your money and time on another novel, perhaps "Heart of Darkness."

I gave up reading this " Gibberish /Jargon " at about the 125th page. Jargon is defined as speech or writing full of long,unfamiliar, or roundabout words or phrases. Jargon accurately describes this novel. If you want to read 400 pages of jargon and try to figure out what Mr. Conrad is trying to say, then this book is definitely for you. I'm sure Mr. Conrad was an excellent sailor but a writer he is not.

This is one of the worst books in the world---in my humble opinion! OK, I'm in the minority. Most of the reviewers LOVED the book. I think this book is a waste of beautiful words! Yes, Conrad had a beautiful English vocabulary. But, the "story" is "encrusted" with so many words you'll tire of it after awhile. OK, try the book, but now, at least, you won't feel as I did, "What's wrong with ME that I don't like this book." You won't feel "alone" in your reaction. I think "Heart of Darkness" is a much better book. Comments? boland7214@aol.

PS: As of 1-15-07 I see that I have ZERO "yes" votes for my review. That's "mean". I'm just giving my honest reaction. You don't have to agree with me but why not give me a break for spending the time and energy just to write my thoughts----thoughts which MIGHT help someone....maybe not you....but someone. Thanks.