Lord Jim is a novel that demands effort from the reader.

It seems to dwell for an excessive amount of time on the unessential aspects of the story.

The narrator is not very prominent, and instead, we hear from Marlowe, a friend and benefactor of Jim's, the same Marlowe we encounter in Heart of Darkness.

We hear the story as Marlowe's crew does, as this is a seafaring novel, yet there is not much actual seafaring.

It is a disjointed tale, which is now rather common, but was innovative at the time.

We learn things secondhand, and one wonders why the Marlow character has such a keen interest in Jim.

The first 60% of the novel might cause some to abandon it.

However, by the time Jim reaches Patusan, the story gains momentum.

The caper he pulls on Sherif Ali is a splendid episode, and the intrusion of Brown is also handled with precision and enthusiasm.

In the end, it is all worthwhile.

Jim is a young and brave sailor who, in a humiliating situation on a shipwreck, feels despair and abandons the ship carrying Asian passengers in the midst of a storm.

After this incident, the burden of guilt and disgrace follows him from one city to another, until the narrator of the story - an old sailor who relates Jim's story with kindness among a group of unknown friends - comes to his aid to bury the life of the guilty Jim in a distant corner away from the tropical jungles, and in this way, a new and honorable life becomes possible for him. A place where the ashamed and sick Jim is transformed into the master Jim, and his greatness of spirit and manliness are revealed to all.

In the poetic and romantic novel of Conrad (with the artistic translation of Salih Hosseini), with beautiful descriptions of nature and human behavior, the form and structure of the story are perfectly in harmony with its deep content.

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I used to look at that young man. I liked his shape and appearance. I knew his shape and appearance. He was attached to himself. He was one of "us". He stood there because of his nature. Because of the men and women who are neither base nor exciting, but their very being is firmly based on the foundation of faith, and on the foundation of the courage of martyrdom... with the background of a rooted faith in the face of the power of reality and the temptation to imitate and promote beliefs. Damn the beliefs! That the roofs and houses are wet with dew and the rings clang in the mind and each one takes a small share of the existence of man... that if one wishes to live gloriously and die easily, one must tie oneself to their mast.

Translation of Salih Hosseini, pp. 48-49

**"Lord Jim": An In-depth Exploration**

Lord Jim is a captivating novel that delves deep into the human psyche. It begins with a powerful description of a man in a state of turmoil, running and being swallowed by the night. The story unfolds, revealing a complex web of themes and characters.

The connection between Lord Jim and Moby Dick is striking. Both are sea novels with male-dominated universes, where the value of solidarity among men in the same profession is fundamental. They are also grand human tragedies disguised as adventure books.

Joseph Conrad, the author of Lord Jim, wrote this novel between September 1899 and July 1900. Interestingly, on the same desk, under the opaque circle of the lamp, lay another of his works, perhaps the most famous and one of the greatest of modernity - Heart of Darkness. Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness are blood brothers, born on the same desk and in the same hours from the mind of this strange man who turned to writing after a life full of adventures.

The central node of Lord Jim can be boiled down to three simple questions: Who is Jim? Why does he behave as he does? Is it possible to understand who Jim is and why he behaves as he does?

Jim is a young man under the age of twenty-four. The son of a respectable English pastor, he chose a life at sea to pursue his dreams of greatness. He is filled with positive values like courage and generosity. However, his downfall comes when, in a moment of danger, overcome by his imagination, he abandons his ship and the men under his protection. This act haunts him for the rest of his life.

Marlow, a solid and experienced captain, is the lens through which we view Jim. Marlow is also the narrator of Heart of Darkness. He is a complex character with a certain self-irony. He is both intrigued and moved by Jim, and he tries to help him.

To help Jim, Marlow turns to his old friend Stein, a German merchant and butterfly collector. Stein diagnoses Jim's problem accurately, calling him a romantic. But how does one cure a romantic? Stein believes that there is no cure, and the only thing to do is to surrender to the destructive element.

Together, Marlow and Stein decide to send Jim to Patusan, a remote island in Malaysia. There, Jim finds a new life and is able to put his dreams into action. He is welcomed as a kind of divinity and leader among the natives, and he earns the appellation of Lord. He also finds love with a young woman named Joy.

However, Jim's paradise is short-lived. Three years later, a white man named Brown arrives on the island. Brown is a pirate and an assassin, and he challenges Jim's newfound peace. The two adversaries face each other on opposite sides of a river, and Jim is once again faced with a moral dilemma.

Lord Jim is a great novel because it does not offer easy answers. The characters are complex and multi-faceted, and the reader is left to grapple with the questions of identity, morality, and the human condition. Is Jim a hero or a villain? Can we ever truly understand another person? These are the questions that make Lord Jim a timeless and thought-provoking work of literature.

This is a rather indigestible brew composed of all kinds of exploited adventure topoi and a few variations on the Joseph-Conrad/Marlow standards.

Formally, this quite exciting reckoning with Romanticism and the dangers of a corresponding attitude is surely not without its shining moments. However, overall, it is just too chatty.

The reading/listening pleasure was rather two stars. Since I dropped out early at the age of 17, I had to persevere this time in order to overcome my Lord-Jim trauma. But it was probably the last confrontation.

Perhaps the author intended to create a complex and multi-layered narrative, but in the end, it felt a bit too convoluted. The excessive use of familiar adventure tropes made it seem a bit derivative at times.

Nevertheless, there were some interesting ideas and moments that managed to hold my attention. It's just that the overall execution could have been tighter and more focused.

All in all, it was an okay read/listen, but not something that I would highly recommend.

My problem with this book was one of misinformation and confused expectations.

I've heard and read numerous references to Lord Jim as being mainly about the sinking of the Patna. It's a true story where a Western-owned and operated vessel filled with Muslims on their way to the Haj in Mecca was thought to be sinking, and the crew abandoned it. As it turns out, it didn't sink, and everyone on board was rescued by another vessel. This, as you can imagine, was quite embarrassing for the crew.

Conrad describes the Patna and its sinking beautifully. I was completely enthralled and excited.

However, this only takes up the first third of the book. The rest follows an unfortunate and tortured crewmember from that voyage as he attempts to rebuild and reinterpret his life in light of this serious lack of moral character during the sinking. And, from the crewmember's trial onward, I simply got bored.

Part of the problem was also the layers of narration Conrad employs. At one point, we have three levels of narration where the narrator relays the first-person account of the protagonist telling him a first-person account of a third character. This was confusing and diffused the urgency and immediacy of the story itself.

The events in the latter two-thirds of the book are mildly interesting but fail to truly intersect with the first part, which was extraordinarily good. They come across as a kind of faint echo of Heart of Darkness, which, in my opinion, was a much better book.

Conrad critiques British imperialism and racist attitudes, which is nice, but if you're looking for a better-written and more interesting treatment of these topics, stick with Heart of Darkness.

http://joshuarigsby.com

Single-handedly launched me into a reading slump. I truly loathed this book and Conrad as well. I find his over-descriptive style extremely tiresome, to the point of boredom that brings me to tears. And believe me, I've read my fair share of boring books, yet I've even managed to enjoy some of them! I'm not one to shy away from a difficult read. However, "Lord Jim" offers very little in return for the effort put into reading it. I finished it feeling as if I'd been exploited for meagre pay.

The narrative device employed was rather clumsy. Marlow relates Jim's story to a group of third parties who lack any distinct characterization and have hardly any lines. So, what was their purpose? They serve as a flimsy excuse to make the novel an oral account. The problem is that the novel doesn't gain anything from this format. At best, you might forget that Marlow is addressing this group of strangers. At worst, it becomes actively confusing. Who's speaking now? Don't ask me, as I tuned out 50 pages ago.

So, what makes this book a classic? The characters, perhaps? In particular, I did love the complex motives of Jim's love interest, simply referred to as 'the girl'. If Conrad rarely bothers to call her by her name, it's because she exists solely as a satellite of Jim. She has no thoughts other than her stubborn love for him, and I'm certain she ceases to exist when he leaves the room. But no, it's not her. Maybe it's the Patusanians that Jim inserts himself among throughout the second half of the book? No, they too lack any real personal qualities. Conrad is sure to endow them with the same worshipful loyalty, and a dumbstruck awe at the mere thought of Jim, the white man. They are also subjected to all kinds of Conrad's dubious insinuations about race and the characteristics he believes it imparts.

All this makes me think of that book by George Saunders, where he states that moral criticism of books can just as appropriately be framed as criticism of its literary construction. "Lord Jim" is bad because it's sexist, or it's bad because Conrad fails to provide a compelling inner world to 'the girl', one of its main characters. It's bad because it's racist, or it's bad because it's so insistent on its reductive view of native people that it misses the opportunity to immerse us in Patusan among real, complex individuals. Frame it either way, but let's agree that it's not a great book. Looking for interesting characterization in this book is like searching for scraps in a wasteland.

"So, what about Jim himself? Is this perhaps one of those books where we're really only concerned with one central figure, and for that reason the other characters fade into the background? I mean, his name is in the title, after all."

Yeah, yeah, the eponymous Jim. Look, it's possible that my overall hatred of the book dulled my perception of its finer qualities, and perhaps what I'm about to say is unfair. But have you ever been so infatuated with someone that you overlook their actual flaws? That's what it seems like everyone, including Marlow, the narrator, does with Jim in this book. As a result, there's a strange disconnect between the way Jim is described and the actual character on the page. For example, there's all this talk from Marlow about Jim being 'truer than all other men' and that he'll never betray, etc., yet it completely contradicts everything we actually see Jim do (running away from every commitment, acting erratically, and fleeing without explanation from those who treat him well because he gets 'the ick'). Why does Marlow like Jim so much? Why does anyone? Okay, and maybe that's the point. Maybe the novel is an exploration of how a cult of personality can form around an average, somewhat annoying guy. Maybe, again, that's why it's called "Lord Jim". But to me, it just doesn't feel believable. You can sense Conrad's hand manipulating the narrative a bit, without putting in the effort to make it flow smoothly and direct the reader's belief.

So yes, I hated it. I must add that there are glimpses of fantastic prose, but that's not enough to salvage the overall experience for me.

Jim is the chief-mate on the steamship Patna.

During a voyage towards Mecca, carrying a cargo of pilgrims, the ship unfortunately strikes a submerged object.

As he watches the small crew lowering a lifeboat to save themselves, Jim initially seems like an idealistic onlooker. However, impulsively, he jumps.

The consequence of this action forms the bottom line of the novel.

The novel showcases a long colonnade of diverse characters. There are the skippers of the Patna, the trader Stein, the Malay steersmen, the deceitful Cornelius, and the pleasurable Brierly.

Conrad's mastery in pithiness is vividly seen in the passionate passages of the novel. His plain style superbly reflects his own insight. For example, we can recall the proposal of tragedy in the unfinished letter of Jim, and the exact words of the dialogue between Jim and the girl before he departs to sacrifice himself.

Jim is a romanticist, a sentimentalist, and a sailor who has the habit of imagining the worst. He also has a heroic appearance in the disaster.

But when the worst actually comes in his life, he acts as a coward and thus loses the opportunity to be a hero. This act of cowardice haunts him for a long time and causes trouble for him.

Finally, he goes to seek a bullet so that he may feel that he is not a coward. Conrad's astonishing knowledge of the sea is well-reflected in this novel.

Besides, we can distinguish an uncomprehended and despondent man in Jim, who in the end sacrifices himself to feel that he is not a coward.

Thus, the novel is a spectacular piece of art regarding its subject matter, character, and style.

Re-read in 2024, in method and arrangement, this novel belonging to Conrad's 'golden period' is as rich and convoluted as Hamlet. Using perpetual changes of perspective, narrations within narrations, variegated time shifts, and other extremely sophisticated and masterly fictional techniques, Conrad weaves a complex moral skein around the anecdote of Jim's desertion of the Patna. An essentially simple adventure-yarn thus becomes a great allegory of human destiny.

From what I have learned from the biographers, initially, Conrad had planned to write a short fiction centered on the Patna incident. When he decided to expand it into a novel, he encountered significant difficulties in integrating it with the Patusan story into a single, rational narrative. Realizing this was the "plague-spot" of his novel, Conrad once told a friend that the cleavage in the middle of the book made him feel "as if he were left with a lump of clay into which he had failed to breathe the right sort of life." However, he need not have worried on that score, as this book ranks among his finest achievements.

An exhaustive romantic, Jim can never come to terms with reality and can never truly accept his limitations as a human being who is often indecisive and sometimes even faint-hearted. Only Stein and Marlow understand that in Jim's single-minded pursuit of redemption, he is both heroic and absurd, and "wrongheaded." His romanticism is both his glory and his dilemma.

Jim is on the verge of redeeming himself from the disgrace of the Patna affair by becoming a trusted and beloved native loader when the invasion of Brown and his crew of cutthroats leads him to make an impractical, idiotically chivalric 'faux pas' that destroys his friends. He would not have made this mistake had Brown not insidiously appealed to his sense of guilt.

Thus, as in the greatest tragedies, Jim's character, haunted by the sin of his past and lost in his search for absolution, brings the final devastation upon him. This novel has been called Conrad's Hamlet, not entirely without reason. This tome presents the multifaceted tragedy of a vacillating fellow of great characteristic nobility who, nevertheless, with "the stamp of one defect," manages to bring death and destruction upon those he loves.

Joseph Conrad is truly one of the most remarkable writers to have ever penned in the English language.

It is astonishing to think that this Polish author was able to achieve such fluency in a language he didn't begin to learn until his twenties.

However, it seems to me that he might be seen as being on the wrong side of the social critic.

This book was on my 100 greatest book poster, and I found it strange that they chose this one rather than his more famous and controversial work, "Heart of Darkness".

The truth is, if you have a social issue, you could easily use this as fodder for discussions on race equality or gender equality. But I'm not that kind of person.

Although I don't agree with all of his viewpoints, I think they are an accurate reflection of his time and social position.

Jim, a blue-eyed, blond-haired, strong son of a clergyman born in England and often described as "one of us", is the first mate on a passenger ship of Muslim emigrants. He abandons the ship with the other white officers.

The idea that dark-skinned people need whites to manage them is a recurring theme. As someone with Cherokee/Creek Native American blood, whose family is only three generations removed from the reservation, I can attest to that kind of mentality in historical terms.

If I can endure the narrative, so can you. Yes, I winced every time this theme was brought up, and my rating reflects that.

Anyway, if you read classics, you know that this brings dishonor to Jim, and in those days, dishonor was worse than death. So Jim spends most of the novel in shame, running from his guilt.

He ends up in a native city and somehow takes control, seemingly due to the overwhelming power of his whiteness. There he meets a girl who is longing for a strong man to sweep her off her feet. Tragedy occurs, and the story comes to an end.

This is a tragic and challenging read. But Conrad, the master of the Victorian European mind, makes this a must-read. It's also a nautical tale, if that's what interests you.

From the lips of his friend Marlow, we learn the story of Lord Jim. There is a sin that, although seemingly confronted with pride and courage in the halls of a tribunal and punished according to justice, still sees the "sinner" fleeing from place to place not in search of redemption, but of a place to forget his own dishonor.

And even when fate seems to bring the cards back into play and allows him to relive the circumstances of the past, several events intervene to prevent him (perhaps) from having the opportunity to make peace with his own demons.

That said, I consider it a half-formed novel. The premises are good, the main narrative thread is good, but Jim remains a mere ghost, a character sketched in passing, almost a kind of extra who does not see that psychological depth and that growth (either positive or negative) that perhaps the novel should have provided and that I would have expected.

Since graduating from college, my reading comprehension has unfortunately declined significantly. It's as if it has quietly gone down the drain, only to be filtered at some refinement center and transformed into slightly fluoridated water. This situation has led to me simply reading the words in books without truly grasping their meaning. Sometimes, I even forget what has happened in the story. Moreover, I often find myself questioning whether I used the word "reticently" in an appropriate manner.

Given my lackluster comprehension skills, I resorted to using Sparknotes to assess how much I was missing. On many occasions, I had no clue what was going on in the text. However, I received some assistance when I realized that Marlow was the narrator for most of the story. For the most part, I wasn't too far off in understanding the general plot of the chapters. Although I missed a plethora of details, I usually managed to get the big picture. My main struggle, though, was with Conrad's convoluted timeline.

Conrad seems to have little regard for things like providing clear narrative cues. It's as if he doesn't bother to let the narrator say, "Oh by the way, I am now reflecting on the time that I met so and so and he told me this story about Jim. Forget that this happened about two years before the stuff that I just told you. I'm going to jump around a lot and not warn you at all. Also, I'm a big fan of using pronouns without always clarifying who they refer to. If you don't pay close attention, you will frequently wonder who the hell he, she, and they are."

Conrad is undoubtedly a remarkable writer, but his works are often difficult for me to understand. His writing style is like that of a beautiful French girl. I enjoy looking at her and listening to her speak, but I only understand every fifth word. Zut! Quelle heure y'til. Bete comme chou. Je m'appelle John. J'ai fin.

From IMDb:
In the 19th century, a seaman named (Peter O'Toole) has been unjustly labeled as a coward, which has completely shattered his reputation. From then on, he lives with only one burning purpose in his heart: to redeem himself and regain the respect that was once lost. This story is based on Joseph Conrad's novel written in 1900, which delves deep into the complex psyche of the protagonist and his arduous journey towards redemption.

Even if it is not an easy reading, I found myself captivated by this book while I was enjoying my trip in Praha. The vivid descriptions and the profound themes of the novel made it a truly engaging experience. It was as if I was transported back in time and could witness the events unfold before my eyes.

For those who are interested in this classic novel, a free download is available at Project Gutenberg. It is a great opportunity to explore the world of Joseph Conrad and discover the beauty and depth of his literary works.

First things first. The prose in "Lord Jim" is truly sublime. It's no wonder Conrad is iconic as a stylist. His use of words and phrases is almost sorcery. There are passages - in fact, several in that and surrounding chapters - that elevate wordplay, atmosphere building, and dramatic description to the status of high art. I find myself reading them again and again, simply to savor the sound and fire my imagination.

One of the most memorable parts of the book describes the tense moments before the passenger steamer Patna hits disaster and the dramatic events that follow. Conrad writes, "A marvelous stillness pervaded the world, and the stars, together with the serenity of their rays, seemed to shed upon the earth the assurance of ever-lasting security. The young moon recurved, and shining low in the west, was like a slender shaving thrown up from a bar of gold, and the Arabian Sea, smooth and cool to the eye like a sheet of ice, extended its perfect level to the perfect circle of a dark horizon." A little later, he continues, "The thin gold shaving of the moon floating slowly downwards had lost itself on the darkened surface of the waters, and the eternity beyond the sky seemed to come down nearer to the earth, with the augmented glitter of the stars, with the more profound somberness in the lustre of the half-transparent dome covering the flat disk of an opaque sea. The ship moved so smoothly that her onward motion was imperceptible to the senses of men, as though she had been a crowded planet speeding through the dark spaces of ether behind the swarm of suns, in the appalling and calm solitudes awaiting the breath of future creations."

From this placid scene, Conrad gradually conjures, like a symphony orchestra conductor, notes of increasing urgency, tension, and menace that lead eventually to the crescendo of the perceived disaster. This disaster leads the ship's white crew to abandon their trusting native passengers, believing the ship will surely capsize after striking something and given the ominous squall headed its way. In a moment of fatal uncertainty, the novel's protagonist Jim jumps off the ship to join the fleeing crew, having been shocked into immobility by the tragic statistic - eight hundred people and seven boats - which translated into nothing but hundreds of deaths. Against his better judgment and loathsome to his moral fibre, he changes his mind of going down with the ship at the very last second. His shame, self-loathing, and struggle for redemption and respect is what the rest of the novel is about.

The story is compelling, and Conrad is masterly in exploring Jim's deep anguish and sense of guilt. What follows is a trial and a desperate bid to find again a modicum of respect and honor. Time and again, Jim flees from wherever he is employed at even the least insinuation from someone that he is one of the deserters, even though it turns out the ship and its passengers did survive. He is not of the same stock as the rest of the crew, who are heartless and cynical and simply brazen it out. Jim's finer feelings and sense of honor continue to torment him.

We hear all this from the character Marlowe, who deeply admires Jim and makes several endeavors for him to restore a life of normalcy. He eventually manages to get him employment somewhere in the wilderness in the Malaysian archipelago. That is where the second part of the novel takes place, as Jim manages to create a position of great honor and respect amongst the natives as a savior of the weak and defender of their interests against existing local power brokers, earning himself the title Tuan Jim or Lord Jim. However, it is here that Conrad's novel descends from the sublime to the deeply problematic, due to his orientalization of everything and his jarring sense of racial superiority.

Not only is the narrative itself quite repetitive - with Marlow's paens for Jim making the progress turgid and plot progression stalled - but also unnatural in its hagiography of Jim. It is downright racist at several levels, as the narrative voice consistently depicts Jim as a superior being from a superior race capable of superior thought and action, who is a natural leader and law-giver; indeed a downright blessing. All that was awry he puts right. All who led before him are base, tyrannical, religious bigots, power-hungry despots, or dullards, or all of these things - whether Sherif Ali (described as a local bandit) or Rajah Tunku Allang (the Malay Chief of Patusan) or Doramin (the old Chief of the Bugis people), or several other minor local characters. Their physical descriptions too "other" them and make them appear monstrous, sub-human. The only ones who are noble are those who dote on and are devoted to the Tuan - Jewel (a mixed race girl), Dain-Waris (Doramin's only son and Jim's friend), and Tamb 'Itam (Jim's dedicated bodyguard). Any glory for the natives is thus purely reflected glory - they are incapable of any great charity, largesse, greatness, or glory.

Apologists have found these to be undertones. Far from it, Marlow's and indeed Conrad's world view is very similar to E. M. Forster's in that it cannot envision the East and West to possibly ever meet - they are so diametrically different; in Conrad, unlike Forster, what is even more evident is that one is far superior to the other. Paints as he does vividly and in beautiful colors and shades the forests and wilderness of the Malayan jungles, Conrad's view of mankind is quite monochromatic. Not only in terms of its bleakness that we are destined to fail in our pursuit of nobility and redemption but also that those who can ever aspire to such a calling are those of higher understanding and morality; or in other words, those of the race of Lord Jim. Yes, there can be evil men amongst that race - such as the jealousy consumed Malacca Portuguese Cornelius or Gentleman Brown and his band of desperate buccaneers - but then they are ultimately and essentially victims of circumstances and hard, cruel lives. Conrad offers for them the apologia - "Men act badly sometimes without being much worse than others." No such words of grace and justification for all the native bad men who come across as pathologically malevolent.

Conrad poetically celebrates the Malayan night: "The sun, whose concentrated glare dwarfs the earth into a restless mote of dust, had sunk behind the forest, and the diffused light from an opal sky seemed to cast upon a world without shadows and without brilliance the illusion of a calm and pensive greatness. I don't know why, listening to him, I should have noted so distinctly the gradual awakening of the river, of the air; the irresistible slow work of the night settling silently on all the visible forms, effacing the outlines, burying the shapes deeper and deeper, like a steady fall of impalpable black dust." And in this heavenly landscape, there is only one being who is close to being celestial. The one who is messiah-like; whose spirit of sacrifice, in Marlow's words, of "giving your life up to them" (them meaning all of mankind with skins brown, yellow, or black in color) "was like selling your soul to a brute." Jim's "racial prestige and the reputation of invincible, supernatural power" is not just the outcome of happenstance, hard service, and calculated moves, but is made to appear natural and inevitable. Yet, "beloved, trusted, and admired as he was" by the natives, to Marlow, and to Conrad, it is always a matter of certitude that "Jim was one of us." The "White Lord" is stoically present, always, to hear the dark-skinned ones, fortunate to be "pouring the plaint of their trifling, miserable, oppressed lives" into his ears. Not unlike Kipling, Conrad's hero too loves the land and the landscape and is benevolent towards those consenting to be his subjects, and at the same time contemptuous and mistrustful towards others less enthusiastic about his desire to carry the White Man's Burden.

Though a prominent part of the Western Canon, "Lord Jim" is the flawed work of a flawed genius. That Conrad was a man of his times and held views that were dominant, pervasive, and prevalent cannot be an excuse given that those views informed, drove, and inspired the subjugation and servitude of a vast mass of humanity on the basis of cruel theorems of racial difference and superiority. Yes, he wrote sublime prose and put forth questions that brilliantly explored our biggest enigmas. But he also "Othered" and Orientalized with an unholy frenzy that few writers of that age matched.