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Jim dreams of being brave and honorable, but in one terrible moment at sea he jumps away from a ship he thinks is sinking, leaving hundreds of passengers behind. Nobody lets him forget it, least of all himself. He travels farther and farther east to escape his shame, until a distant trading post gives him one last chance to prove who he really is. It is a sad, gripping story about guilt.
Joseph Conrad spent twenty years at sea before he became a writer, and Lord Jim, published in 1900, is the book where his two lives meet. Most of the story is told by Marlow, a thoughtful sea captain who meets Jim, cannot stop wondering about him, and tells his tale to listeners long into the night.
Jim is a young English officer with high hopes of himself. As chief mate of the Patna, carrying hundreds of pilgrims across the Indian Ocean, he believes the damaged ship will sink, and in a moment of panic he jumps into a boat with the other officers. The ship does not sink. An inquiry takes his certificate, and Jim drifts from port to port as a water clerk, running whenever his past catches up. At last the merchant Stein sends him to Patusan, a remote trading post, where the people trust him and call him Tuan Jim.
Conrad never gives a simple verdict on Jim. Was he a coward, a dreamer, or both? That honest uncertainty, and the slow, circling way Marlow tells it, make this one of the great novels about honor.
Joseph Conrad, a Polish born sailor who became an English novelist, published Lord Jim in 1900, telling most of it through his sea captain Marlow. Jim, a young chief mate, abandons the pilgrim ship Patna with its passengers in danger, and the shame follows him from port to port. In a remote trading post he tries to live it down. It offers a searching study of honor, guilt, and second chances.
Lord Jim was published in book form in 1900, after running in thirteen numbers of Blackwood's Magazine, and Conrad's own note, carried at the front, explains that it began as a short story about the pilgrim ship episode alone. The novel grew because that single act, he found, could colour a whole life.
The opening chapters present Jim directly, a young officer from an English parsonage who works as a water clerk in eastern ports, always moving on when his past is named. Then Marlow takes over the telling, reconstructing the Patna inquiry, Jim's years of flight, and his settlement at Patusan under the protection of the merchant Stein, where he becomes a trusted power among the local people.
Read it as a framed narrative rather than a straight adventure. Marlow's long evening's telling, with its interruptions and returns, is the novel's method: the facts arrive early, and the meaning is circled for the rest of the book.
Edition: Text: Project Gutenberg ebook 5658.
The first chapter
When this novel first appeared in book form a notion got about that I had been bolted away with. Some reviewers maintained that the work starting as a short story had got beyond the writer’s control. One or two discovered internal evidence of the fact, which seemed to amuse them. They pointed out the limitations of the narrative form. They argued that no man could have been expected to talk all that time, and other men to listen so long. It was not, they said, very credible.
After thinking it over for something like sixteen years, I am not so sure about that. Men have been known, both in the tropics and in the temperate zone, to sit up half the night ‘swapping yarns’. This, however, is but one yarn, yet with interruptions affording some measure of relief; and in regard to the listeners’ endurance, the postulate must be accepted that the story was interesting. It is the necessary preliminary assumption. If I hadn’t believed that it was interesting I could never have begun to write it. As to the mere physical possibility we all know that some speeches in Parliament have taken nearer six than three hours in delivery; whereas all that part of the book which is Marlow’s narrative can be read through aloud, I should say, in less than three hours. Besides--though I have kept strictly all such insignificant details out of the tale--we may presume that there must have been refreshments on that night, a glass of mineral water of some sort to help the narrator on.
But, seriously, the truth of the matter is, that my first thought was of a short story, concerned only with the pilgrim ship episode; nothing more. And that was a legitimate conception. After writing a few pages, however, I became for some reason discontented and I laid them aside for a time. I didn’t take them out of the drawer till the late Mr. William Blackwood suggested I should give something again to his magazine.
It was only then that I perceived that the pilgrim ship episode was a good starting-point for a free and wandering tale; that it was an event, too, which could conceivably colour the whole ‘sentiment of existence’ in a simple and sensitive character. But all these preliminary moods and stirrings of spirit were rather obscure at the time, and they do not appear clearer to me now after the lapse of so many years.
The few pages I had laid aside were not without their weight in the choice of subject. But the whole was re-written deliberately. When I sat down to it I knew it would be a long book, though I didn’t foresee that it would spread itself over thirteen numbers of Maga.
I have been asked at times whether this was not the book of mine I liked best. I am a great foe to favouritism in public life, in private life, and even in the delicate relationship of an author to his works. As a matter of principle I will have no favourites; but I don’t go so far as to feel grieved and annoyed by the preference some people give to my Lord Jim. I won’t even say that I ‘fail to understand . . .’ No! But once I had occasion to be puzzled and surprised.
A friend of mine returning from Italy had talked with a lady there who did not like the book. I regretted that, of course, but what surprised me was the ground of her dislike. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘it is all so morbid.’
The pronouncement gave me food for an hour’s anxious thought. Finally I arrived at the conclusion that, making due allowances for the subject itself being rather foreign to women’s normal sensibilities, the lady could not have been an Italian. I wonder whether she was European at all? In any case, no Latin temperament would have perceived anything morbid in the acute consciousness of lost honour. Such a consciousness may be wrong, or it may be right, or it may be condemned as artificial; and, perhaps, my Jim is not a type of wide commonness. But I can safely assure my readers that he is not the product of coldly perverted thinking. He’s not a figure of Northern Mists either. One sunny morning, in the commonplace surroundings of an Eastern roadstead, I saw his form pass by--appealing--significant--under a cloud--perfectly silent. Which is as it should be. It was for me, with all the sympathy of which I was capable, to seek fit words for his meaning. He was ‘one of us’.
J.C.
1917.
LORD JIM
Source: Project Gutenberg. Published 1900. Author died 1924. Public domain worldwide. Share this book: WhatsApp
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