Heroism and Narrative Form in Lord Jim

Abstract

Lord Jim, begun before Heart of Darkness and finished afterwards, in 1900, more daringly evolves its narrative structure on the pattern of Marlow’s ironic sensibility. The bold temporal displacement of events, the juxtaposition of widely divergent yet thematically related characters, the portrait of Jim spied through ‘rents in a fog’, all are responses to the collapse dramatised within Lord Jim of the moral foundations of the nineteenth-century realistic novel and, indeed, of Marlow’s character. For Jim, heinously guilty and nonetheless ‘one of us’, tears Marlow from the cradle of self-satisfied complacency, and into a realm of half-light and moral uncertainty.

He existed for me, and after all it is only through me that he exists for you. I’ve led him out by the hand; I have paraded him before you.¹