Lord Jim

Jim is onboard a vessel in the Indian Ocean when tragedy strikes. After he fails to rise to the occasion, it precipitates a personal crisis that pursues him from place to place until he can find an opportunity to make good. It's presented as a story about a man's sense of honour, a rare and outdated motive for any character these days. But human emotion has not evolved so greatly in a hundred and fifty years, so what is this novel really about? Personal integrity and a stable sense of self. Guilt, certainly. Not having lived up to the image of oneself. I think peace of mind lies at the heart of it as well. Jim was far more happy when he could idly daydream and reality did not so liberally intrude on his everyday thoughts. Dreamers show more remain unhappy so long as reality imposes itself.

Jim's endlessly moving on to stay ahead of his past reminded me of trying to run today from from the impacts of relentless online slander and harassment: it can't be done. Jim finds it more honourable, or honest to himself, not to linger in one place any longer than it takes his past to catch up with him, when the only real option is to remain in place and grapple with it. But ultimately in Jim's case he is trying to run from himself, and nobody can run that far. Another intriguing aspect to Jim's guilt which Conrad explores is his consequently falling prey to empathy for another who claims to have committed similar acts, blinded to the critical difference that the other feels no guilt at all.

As the narrator, Marlowe is important in this story as well. He feels a strange affinity that compels him to help Jim, almost a need. He senses what the reader senses, that Jim represents what might happen to any of us, and whether any redemption is possible if we were to commit such a misdeed? Or would we flee the very guilt itself, burying it under rationalizations? Marlowe feels if he doesn't do something to assist Jim, he must surrender to the concept of life as an irredeemable tragedy or, worse, personal integrity as a lie we are ready to shed whenever it's convenient. The episode with Marlowe's friend Stein suggests the story is also about something closer to the everyday, about the regrets we all have, big or small, and our insistence on dwelling upon them as everyone around us wonders why we bother. show less

Jim, for we don’t know him by anymore of a name, is the Chief Mate on the Patna, a vessel transporting hundreds of passengers on pilgrimage. When the vessel collides with something and begins to take on water, the officers abandon the ship in cowardice and fear. Jim abandons the ship with the rest of the crew, though it is unclear, even to him, why he does so. The ship and its passengers survive and, when the rest of the crew disappears, Jim alone stands trial and is stripped of his officer certification. Jim meets Marlow, a man who has watched the trial fascinated with the young officer, when Jim is at his lowest, ashamed and near the point of suicide. Marlow, seeing something noble and principled in Jim even if Jim doubts it in show more himself, introduces Jim to a friend who employees him on a remote island as a post manager. There, Jim begins to escape his past and rebuild his life and confidence, leading a native rebellion against a cruel despot and falling in love. But when a pirate besets the island and kills one of Jim’s best friends and allies, he embraces a final act of honor and sacrifice to finally be rid of the shame that has haunted him.

Joseph Conrad’s [Lord Jim] is a masterpiece of non-linear narrative. Marlow, the narrator, recounts the story of Jim’s life to colleagues, in an attempt to understand the young man. Marlow’s knowledge of Jim and his exploits come from a variety of sources, and not completely from Jim himself. Marlow pieces the events of the Patna together from the versions told him by Jim, told during the trial, told by one of the judges at the trial, and told by other seamen he meets later in life. Marlow’s accounts of Jim’s later life are primarily from the people who knew Jim on the island. And Marlow comes by this information in fits and starts, telling it without chronology but as he learned it. The result is a tale that folds back on itself many, many times, always offering a new and varying understanding of Jim and his life.

Conrad’s appeal is his ability to tell an exciting and readable story while still managing to layer in deep philosophical ideas about honor, redemption, and human nature. Conrad’s novels, and [Lord Jim] most particularly, are obsessed with the idea of a hero in search of his personal identity, torn between yearnings or shortcomings and an ambition for a nobler self. The novel’s place in the canon of literature, and that it remains a very popular novel, say something about what we see of ourselves in that struggle.

Bottom Line: A beautiful, philosophical tale of redemption, told as a thrilling adventure story.

5 bones!!!!!
A favorite for the year! show less

Despite the fact that I'd read this book before, it might as well have been a new read for me, given it was almost nine years ago, and all that I remembered was a vague sense that I liked it. Well, I liked it again-- really liked it. The narrative structure of the book, as Marlowe attempts to unravel the mystery that is Jim by talking to a number of different sources, including Jim himself, renders the book fascinating, as you yourself spend your time trying to unravel Jim. Who is he? Why did he jump? We never quite get the answers to those questions, but I think that's for the best. Ultimately, this is a book about the unknowable, and we cannot know Jim any more than he can know himself-- even in death. Early in the story, the narrator show more tells us that Jim went to sea to be like a hero in a book-- presumably a book like Daniel Defoe's or Walter Scott's-- but though he becomes a character in Marlowe's narrative, that heroism can not and never will be fully recovered, not as long as Jim keeps on running. And not as long as he remains trapped in reality, not the fictional world he aspires to. show less

Joseph Conrad is one of the rare authors who writes stories where the narration is as thought provoking as the events themselves.

In Lord Jim, the first third of the story might feel drawn and somewhat aimless, but it lays the foundation for the rest of the story masterfully, where the main character, Jim, seeks his destiny with the help of the narrator, Marlow. The portrayal of Jim is intentionally kept vague and incomplete; Marlow himself declares he never fully knew the man, but by the end of the story the reader understands his struggle on a deep level that can only induce great sympathy and appreciation of his inner struggle.

It's a difficult read for most readers, I'm sure, but I can recommend it with certainty for its beauty.

4/5

If you’ve heard that Joseph Conrad wrote sea tales and come to Lord Jim expecting a Hornblower tale, you’ll be disappointed. Conrad’s first-hand experience of the sea in its many moods is evident. But the sea is merely the canvas; Conrad’s real subject is the depths of the heart, the vagaries of the human psyche. In this, Conrad’s books are similar to those of a contemporary novelist, Henry James.
The title character of the book appears and disappears, yet is the center of the book. Most of what we learn about Jim is third hand, as is much of the action of the plot. Almost all of the book, from chapter 5 to chapter 35, is told by a seaman only identified as Marlow, who also narrates Heart of Darkness. It’s an interesting show more narration technique: between us, the readers, and the protagonist stands the author, the nameless narrator who recounts what he heard from Marlow, who for his part, fills in what he heard directly from Jim with the accounts of other memorable characters such as Stein and Gentleman Brown. This distances us from the action. Marlow’s comment about Jim in chapter 21, “It is only through me that he exists for you,” is a reminder from Conrad of what is true about all fiction.
From childhood, Jim dreamed of performing heroic deeds. Stein, one of the many memorable secondary characters, diagnoses him, without ever meeting him, as a romantic. Yet when Jim twice finds himself in a situation calling for action—not even something heroic, but no more than would be expected of any seaman—he freezes. An understandable lapse, except that Jim cannot forgive himself, especially after the second incident, which leaves him stripped of his seaman’s papers. Jim can’t live with the discrepancy between his imagined ideal of himself and the reality of his failure, so he tries to disappear—running not so much from others as from himself.
Marlow slips into acting as his patron, arranging a series of positions for him, from which Jim flees every time his identity is revealed. Finally, Jim achieves some measure of peace in the remote trading station of Patusan, sent to be the agent of Stein. It isn’t long before he lives up to his image of himself, becoming the Tuan, the lord of the local population, and finding love with a woman he calls Jewel, stepdaughter of the corrupt agent he displaces. The idyll can’t last, of course. The last few chapters of this book, once a malevolent agent of destiny enters, were nearly unbearable to read. It seems as if Jim can only be destroyed by his evil twin, another product of Britain’s “us,” that is, the “right people.” Yet, like Jim, Gentleman Brown has been deformed by his experience of the South Seas. Whereas for Jim, the deformity takes the form of a naive devotion to honor, Brown has lost all sense of it.
All in all, this book is a well-told tale, written in rich late-nineteenth-century prose. Conrad, like Henry James, can strike the modern reader as long-winded. He often takes three sentences to say what writers today might say in one. This doesn’t strike me as padding, however. Instead, the expansiveness serves a purpose. It’s not for speed-reading but savoring. show less

As with Almayer's Folly, Conrad's first novel, Lord Jim features yet another vagrant soul who is lost in his own society, driven from it, in fact, and left to create an entirely new world among Malays and Bugis in a remote village, Patusan. Jim's psyche is fractured, beyond repair. The weakness exhibited in his early fall from grace comes back to destroy him after he has seemingly righted his life.

This psychological expose is told mostly through the narration of Marlow, a merchant captain who befriends Jim after his honor is irreparably destroyed at a court of inquiry. But Marlow is not the only figure to give the reader glimpses of Jim. There are multiple perspectives. And at one point, even an unseen narrator who reflects on the show more reflections of Marlow.

Written at the dawn of the twentieth century, Jim's story is a seminal one for a century of Western protagonists educated to be Romantics but conditioned by skepticism and cynicism to expect the worst results possible. Jim's fate, psychological growth arrested and dashed at the very moment of seeming successful, became the tale of many would-be adventurers who found despair and isolation at their end rather than love and acceptance. show less

A young man, raised in a good family with good values, views himself as a fundamentally good person. He settles on a career at sea where his confidence, courage, and commitment help him quickly rise through the ranks to a position of considerable prestige and responsibility. On an ill-fated voyage, though, disaster strikes and, in a moment of panic, the young man’s courage deserts him in a way that imperils the lives of hundreds of passengers under his charge. Does this one action make the man a coward, either in his own mind or in the eyes of others? If so, to what lengths must he go to seek redemption for that single, critical transgression? What is the ultimate price that he must pay to restore his sense of honor?

These are the show more questions that frame the basic story in Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad’s psychological profile of one man’s fall from grace and subsequent struggle to redeem himself. In fact, for me, the novel actually works better on the level of a character study than it does as a compelling adventure tale. To be sure, the author’s writing is beautifully rendered throughout the book and some of the descriptions of the protagonist’s exploits at sea and in the remote Malay village where he ends up are amazing. However, there are also lengthy passages in which the narrator—the same Capitan Marlow from Heart of Darkness—drones on in a way that detracts considerably from the flow of the story. So, despite its reputation as one of the great novels of the past century, what will stay with me about Lord Jim is its timeless message about human fallibility and the power of second chances. show less