Showing results for "Lord Jim" in Literary Fiction

Lord Jim tells the story of a young, idealistic Englishman---"as unflinching as a hero in a book"---who is disgraced by a single act of cowardice while serving as an officer on the Patna, a merchant-ship sailing from an eastern port. His life is ruined: an isolated scandal has assumed horrifying proportions. But then he is befriended by an older man named Marlow....

‘Who could tell what forms, what visions, what faces, what forgiveness he could see in the glow of the west!’ Jim is a well-bred young romantic who takes to the seas with hopes of adventure and the aspiration to prove his mettle. When the boat he sails in threatens to sink, Jim abandons ship...

Joseph Conrad was a native of Poland, yet many critics regard him as one of the greatest English novelists. This is all the more remarkable, since he did not learn to speak English fluently until he was in his 20s. He became a naturalized British citizen in 1886. He wrote many books and stories, but the two that remain most popluar are Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. Lord Jim is both an adventure story and a story of tragedy and repentence.

This work set the style for a whole class of literature, a work that the critic Morton Dauwen Zabel calls an example of Conrad's "central theme...the grip of circumstances that enforce self-discovery and its cognate, the discovery of reality and truth...." It is a novel about a man's lifelong efforts to atone for an act of instinctive cowardice.

When Jim, a young merchant seaman, joins a ship carrying Muslims to Mecca, he's flush with heroic daydreams. But after only a few days aboard, the Patna hits something in the night and begins to take on water. In a crucial moment that tests his courage, Jim cowers and abandons ship rather than risk his life to save the pilgrims. Tried for shameful dereliction of duty, the guilt-ridden Englishman sets forth to make amends for his past in the remote territory of Patusan.