Lord Jim

“We are snared into doing things for which we get called names, and things for which we get hanged, and yet the spirit may well survive—survive the condemnation, survive the halter, by Jove! And there are things—they look small enough sometimes too—by which some of us are totally and completely undone. I watched the youngster there. I liked his appearance; he came from the right place; he was one of us.”

Marlow consistently refers to Jim as one of us, a white gentleman with both the burden and, in Marlow’s view, the promise of empire before him. Having survived the Patna incident, Jim still has the potential for redemption and the ability to do something of substance with his life. Marlow’s musing here foreshadows Jim’s attempts to realize those dreams.

“No wonder Jim’s case bored him, and while I thought with something akin to fear of immensity of his contempt for the young man under examination, he was probably holding silent inquiry into his own case. The verdict must have been one of unmitigated guilt, and he took the secret of the evidence with him into that leap into the sea.”

Captain Brierly, who heads the inquiry into the Patna, dies by suicide shortly after the inquiry, though he has an apparently spotless record. The author shows here that no conscience can be entirely clear, and confronting one’s own transgressions is a frightening task, even though they may be hidden from others—as in Jim’s case in Patusan.

“He was not afraid of death perhaps, but I’ll tell you what, he was afraid of the emergency. His confounded imagination had evoked for him all the horrors of panic, the trampling rush, the pitiful screams, boats swamped—all the appalling incidents of disaster at sea he had ever heard of. He might have been resigned to die but I suspect he wanted to die without added terrors, quietly, in a sort of peaceful trance.”

Jim’s romantic imagination is critical to his character, with his dreams of heroic deeds often featured. Here, Marlow indicates that the romantic imagination can turn on one, causing visions and even phantoms of terrors overwhelming enough to prompt rash action, such as Jim’s impulsive leap from the Patna into the boat.

“’I knew nothing about it till I looked up,’ he explained hastily. And that’s possible too. You had to listen to him as you would to a small boy in trouble. He didn’t know. It had happened somehow. It would never happen again. He had landed partly on somebody and fallen across a thwart. He felt as though all his ribs on his left side must be broken; then he rolled over and saw vaguely the ship he had deserted uprising above him, with the red side-light glowing large in the rain like a fire on the brow of a hill seen through a mist. ‘She seemed higher than a wall; she loomed like a cliff over the boat…I wished I could die,’ he cried. ‘There was no going back. It was as if I had jumped into a well—into an everlasting deep hole.’”

Jim’s actual leap into the boat from the Patna seems a blur to him, almost as if he was one moment on the Patna and the next in the boat, without recalling the jump in between. However, once in the boat there is no return to the Patna; once a critical choice in life is made, it cannot be unmade, and there is no regaining the opportunity to make the choice.

“Jim remained thoughtful. ‘Well?’ I said. ‘What did I care what story they agreed to make up?’ he cried recklessly. ‘They could tell what they jolly well liked. It was their business. I knew the story. Nothing they could make people believe could alter it for me. I let him talk, argue—talk, argue. He went on and on and on.’”

Storytelling, point of view, and control of the narrative are critical elements to the novel. The Patna captain’s attempt get the story straight before the crew is picked up from the boat, and Jim’s resistance to this, becomes a microcosm of these elements.

“He had followed me as manageable as a little child, with an obedient air, with no sort of manifestation, rather as though he had been waiting for me there to come along and carry him off. I need not have been so surprised as I was at his tractability. On all the round earth, which to some seems so big and others affect to consider as rather smaller than a mustard-seed, he had no place where he could—what shall I say?—where he could withdraw.”

Jim’s need for a place to withdraw following the Patna inquiry’s decision foreshadows his need throughout the remainder of the novel, at least until he reaches Patusan, to escape his past. The way he meekly follows Marlow shows that Marlow now controls him and continues to make choices for Jim about his next move at least until Jim arrives in Patusan.

“I made a trip to the northward, and when I returned I found another letter from my friend waiting for me. It was the first envelope I tore open. ‘There are no spoons missing, as far as I know,’ ran the first line; ‘I haven’t been interested enough to enquire. He is gone, leaving on the breakfast-table a formal little note of apology, which is either silly or heartless. Probably both—and it’s all one to me.’”

This letter from Marlow’s friend marks the first incident in a series. As the incident on the Patna comes close to catching up with him, Jim repeatedly leaves employments abruptly and moves to other ports until he arrives in Patusan.

“I took him away from Bangkok in my ship, and we had a longish passage. It was pitiful to see how he shrank within himself. A seaman, even if a mere passenger, takes an interest in a ship, and looks at the sea-life around him with the critical enjoyment of a painter, for instance, looking at another man’s work. In every sense of the expression he is ‘on deck’; but my Jim, for the most part, skulked down below as though he had been a stowaway.”

The Patna incident has obviously taken its toll on Jim. The confident, romantic seaman has lost even his interest in sea travel and hides from everything after a barfight in Bangkok ends his last employment prior to Patusan.

“‘There is only one remedy! One thing alone can us from being ourselves cure!’ The finger came down on the desk with a smart rap. The case which he had made to look so simple before became if possible still simpler—and altogether hopeless. There was a pause. ‘Yes,’ said I, strictly speaking, ‘the question is not how to get cured, but how to live.’”

Stein and Marlow here discuss Jim’s romantic character and how to provide him a means to live within it. Jim’s romanticism can be seen as a tragic flaw, particularly given the eventual results of his placement in Patusan. As they try to decide how to deal with Jim’s romantic nature, Stein and Marlow discuss Jim as if he were a piece on a chess board. Indeed, their placement of Jim will determine the game of Jim’s life.

“However, neither heavenly bodies nor astronomers have anything to do with Patusan. It was Jim who went there. I only meant you to understand that had Stein arranged to send him into a star of the fifth magnitude the change could not have been greater.”

Marlow here emphasizes the absolute difference of Patusan’s environment from anything Jim would have experienced before, almost as if Stein were placing him at another point in the galaxy. Patusan’s remoteness is critical to Stein and Marlow’s decision to place Jim there.

“We return to face our superiors, our kindred, our friends—those whom we obey, and those whom we love; but even they who have neither, the most free, lonely, irresponsible and bereft of all ties,—even those for whom home holds no dear face, no familiar voice—even they have to meet the spirit that dwells within the land, under its sky, in its air, in its valleys, and on its rises, in its fields, in its waters and its trees—a mute friend, judge and inspirer.”

Marlow muses here regarding home. Jim feels he can no longer return to his original home, and the question then becomes whether Jim can establish a new home and whether at one point he establishes at least an illusory home in Patusan.

“He was stumping about the room flourishing his arm absurdly, and now and then feeling on his breast for the ring under his clothes. Where was the sense of exaltation in a man appointed to be a trading-clerk, and in a place where there was no trade—at that? Why hurl defiance at the universe?”

Stein and Marlow’s plan to send Jim to Patusan has revived Jim’s romanticism and enthusiasm. His very enthusiasm and confidence lead Marlow to foreshadow that he may be once again tempting fate to reward him with a terrible fall.

“Doramin was one of the most remarkable men of his race I had ever seen. His bulk for a Malay was immense, but he did not look merely fat; he looked imposing, monumental. This motionless body, clad in rich stuffs, coloured silks, gold embroideries; this huge head, enfolded in a red-and-gold headkerchief; the flat, big, round face, wrinkled, furrowed, with two semicircular heavy folds starting on each side of wide, fierce nostrils, and enclosing a thick-lipped mouth; the throat like a bull; the vast corrugated brow overhanging the staring proud eyes—made a whole that, once seen, can never be forgotten. His impassive repose (he seldom stirred a limb when once he sat down) was like a display of dignity.”

Doramin can be seen as a foil for Jim in that he has an earned gravitas, whereas Jim has been placed in a position of relative power without having earned it. Doramin’s size and body type only add to the seeming weight of his authority, again in contrast to the youthful Jim and his active style of leadership.

“And there I was with him, high in the sunshine on top of that historic hill of his. He dominated the forest, the secular gloom, the old mankind. He was like a figure set up on a pedestal, to represent in his persistent youth the power, and perhaps the virtues, of races that never grow old, that have emerged from the gloom.”

Marlow can be seen here as admiring his handiwork. He and Stein have placed Jim in Patusan, and the results to this point have been stunning. The young white leader to this point has fulfilled all the promise of empire, but the position is illusory.

“I tried to put the subject aside. It was difficult, for there could be no question that Jim had the power; in his new sphere there did not seem to be anything that was not his to hold or to give. But that, I repeat, was nothing in comparison with the notion, which occurred to me, while I listened with a show of attention, that he seemed to have come very near at last to mastering his fate.”

Marlow has been discussing with Doramin whether Dain Waris might one day be ruler, as is Doramin’s wish. The fact that Jim, the white man placed in Patusan, already appears to have the power to make this happen or not for the Indigenous Waris is a commentary on empire and unearned white authority. Just as tellingly, Marlow can make only a show of attention to this critical conversation of Doramin’s. Marlow is busy musing on whether Patusan has fulfilled his wishes for Jim.

“Finally,—one night, Cornelius himself, with a great apparatus of alarm and secrecy, unfolded in solemn wheedling tones a little plan wherein for one hundred dollars—or even for eighty; let’s say eighty—he, Cornelius, would procure a trustworthy man to smuggle Jim out of the river, all safe.”

Cornelius here provides his own cynical recognition that the white men will always leave. Under the guise of protecting Jim from assassination, he will get Jim down river for a mere $80. The white man will sooner or later leave anyway, so Cornelius might as well make a little money off the deal.

“Then he got up and began to walk about in some agitation. ‘I—I love her dearly. More than I can tell. Of course one cannot tell. You take a different view of your actions when you come to understand, when you are made to understand every day that your existence is necessary—you see, absolutely necessary—to another person.’”

While Jim loves Jewel, he is here revealing a hubris that continues to grow with his time in Patusan. Jim eventually comes to believe not just that his existence is necessary to Jewel, but that the people of Patusan generally need him in order to live. Events prove him mistaken in his egotism.

“Nothing easier than to say, Have no fear! Nothing more difficult. How does one kill fear, I wonder?”

Marlow tries to persuade Jewel that Jim is in Patusan to stay and she need not fear him leaving her. In doing so, he considers fear in general as a driving force in many lives, including Jim’s. Jim’s fear of having to further face up to the incident of the Patna has led him to Patusan in the first place.

“It was a great peace, as if the earth had been one grave, and for a time I stood there thinking mostly of the living who, buried in remote places out the knowledge of mankind, still are fated to share in its tragic or grotesque miseries. In its noble struggles too—who knows? The human heart is vast enough to contain all the world. It is valiant enough to bear the burden, but where is the courage that would cast it off?”

Standing near Jewel’s mother’s grave, Marlow is considering the amount of burden from the past that a person can carry—an enormous amount—and still survive. He is thinking about Jim when he wonders where a person might find the courage to cast off the burden of the past and live free from it. Jim can be seen as making such an attempt in Patusan, though he ultimately fails.

“I breathed deeply, I reveled in the vastness of the opened horizon, in the different atmosphere that seemed to vibrate with the toil of life, with the energy of an impeccable world. This sky and sea were open to me.”

Marlow is overjoyed at getting back to the open ocean when leaving Patusan for the last time. He is here contrasted with Jim, who is trapped in Patusan even though he occupies a position of leadership.

“She recognized me at once, and as soon as I had stopped, looking down upon her: ‘He has left me,’ she said quietly; ‘you always leave us—for your own ends.’”

A theme throughout the novel is that in the workings of empire the whites will always come and go. This certainty is spoken by the multiple Bugis, Jewel, and others. When Jim finally refuses to fight or flee and accepts death instead at Doramin’s hands, Jewel sees this as a white man once again leaving. If Jim’s death is seen as a romantic suicide, she may indeed accurately identify it as being for Jim’s own ends.

“You have been white once, for all your tall talk of this being your people and you being one of them. Are you? And what the devil do you get for it; what is it you’ve found here that’s so d—d precious?”

Brown, a foil for Jim, here gives his own cynical version of a truth throughout the novel and throughout empire: the whites will take care of their own. Jim apparently trusts Brown to keep his word and simply leave without further killing simply because Brown is a white man, despite the fact he has admitted being a thief. Brown’s pointed questions poke at Jim’s guilty conscience, and Jim’s decisions concerning Brown are consistently poor as a result.

“Then Jim understood. He had retreated from one world, for a small matter of an impulsive jump, and now the other, the work of his own hands, had fallen in ruin upon his head. It was not safe for his servant to go out amongst his own people!”

Jim realizes that his position in Patusan, always the hollow one of a white man placed there in support of empire, has crumbled with the death of Dain Waris. He draws a direct parallel to the ruin of his prior dreams of naval glory, brought about by his impulsive jump from the Patna.