Customer Reviews

Lord Jim

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4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

This is one of those books that anybody who has been throughhigh school should have been exposed (or at least exposed to the CliffNotes on the novel). I remember being assigned this book as a junior or senior and bluffing my way through without really reading it. I even got a literature degree without reading it. Finally, after many years, I felt that I should give the novel its due, and picked up a copy.

The novel is the story of Jim, an overly romantic seaman, who during a moment of crisis loses his courage. He is first mate on a pilgrim ship bound for Mecca and after the ship collides with an unseen object and is in danger of sinking, he abandons ship leaving the human cargo to fend for its own. He is dogged by his guilt and spends years drifting around the East trying to find the right occasion by which he might redeem himself. Eventually he ends up in the forests of Malaysia where he becomes a god-like protector of the indigenous people and is given the title of "Lord." But no matter how successful Jim might appear to his followers, and to the omnipresent narrator of the novel, he still cannot forget his moment of weakness. Jim's self-centeredness prevents him from moving forward with his life and condemns him to a life of voluntary exile, all the time proclaiming that he is not good enough to live in the outside world. He is willing to risk all future happiness and fortune to be able to face his demons once again without losing his nerves. Ironically, it is his last "heroic" act that destroys all the good that Jim has painstakingly built up, essentially bringing chaos to his Eden like world.

Published at the very beginning of the twentieth century, Lord Jim, in many ways anticipated the experimental writing techniques that would be brought to fruition in the works of Joyce, Faulkner, and others. Conrad is not only interested in telling a tale, he is interested in different points of view, nonlinear narrative techniques, and solving the complexities inherent in a "tale within a tale" formula. Although some readers might find Conrad's prose a little tedious, perseverence and careful reading will reveal passages of unexpected beauty that will cause the reader to pause -- then slowly re-read.

This is the fifth book I have read by Conrad, and through these readings I have come to deeply appreciate his literary power and the perfection of his stories. Conrad has the skill to border about several similar subjects, without repeating himself. "Lord Jim" is truly a Shakespearean tragedy, mainly because of the Shakespearean nature of the main character. Jim is a young naval officer with high hopes of heroism and moral superiority, but when he faces his first test of courage, he miserably fails. While 800 Muslim pilgrims are asleep aboard the ship "Patna", Jim discovers that the boat is about to sink. There are not sufficient lifeboats for everybody. Should he wake them up or not? He gets paralyzed with fear and then sudenly jumps into a boat being set up by the rest of the officers. He is taken to trial and disposessed of his working licence.

Ashamed and humiliated, Jim dedicates the rest of his life to two things: escape the memory of that fateful night, and redeem himself. This agonizing quest to recover his dignity in front of his own eyes leads him to hide in a very remote point in the Malayan peninsula, where he will become the hero, the strong man, the wise protector of underdeveloped, humble and ignorant people. Jim finds not only the love of his people, but also the love of a woman who admires him and fears the day when he might leave for good. The narrator, Captain Marlow (the same of "Heart of Darkness") talks to Jim for the last time in his remote refuge, and then Jim tells him that he has redeemed himself by becoming the people's protector. Oh, but these things are never easy and Jim will face again the specter of failure.

Conrad has achieved a great thing by transforming the "novel of adventures" into the setting for profound and interesting reflections on the moral stature of Man, on courage, guilt, responsibility, and redemption.

Just as in "Heart of Darkness" the question is what kinds of beings we are stripped of cultural, moral and religious conventions; just as in "Nostromo" the trustworthiness of a supposedly honest man is tested by temptation, in "Lord Jim" the central subject is dignity and redemption after failure.

A great book by one of the best writers.

After reading this book (along with several other of Conrad's books) I am under the impression that Joseph Conrad may very well be my favorite author. Here is another masterpiece, a deeply incisive study of character of the motivation and the ultimate failure of all high-minded ideals. Granted my own personal world view falls directly in line with this realization and therefore prejudices me towards anything the man might write, but, when considering such a lofty title as 'favorite author' one must regard other aspects of the novelist's creation. As with the others, Conrad wins by the power of his stories.

Lord Jim is my least favorite of the the four books I have read by Conrad. The story is rather scattered: a righteous young man does something wrong that he holds himself far too accountable for and the public shame the action brought him exaggerates the reality of his failure and makes him believe the rumors swirling around about his so-called cowardice. He spends the remainder of his life trying to reclaim his self-regard, mostly exaggerating his own importance in matters he hardly understands. His goal is to liberate the primitive people of the jungle paradise he inadvertantly finds himself in (due to an effort to escape every particle of the world he once inhabited) and his once high-minded ideals and regard for himself lead him to allow those people to consider him almost a God.

Jim likes being a God and considers himself a just and fair one. He treats everyone equally and gives to his people the knowledge of modern science and medicine as well as the everyday archetecture and understanding of trade that those primitive folks would otherwise be years from comprehending.

Of course everything ends in failure and misery and of course Jim's restored name will be returned to its demonic status, but the whole point of the novel seems to me that one can not escape their past. Jim, for all his courage in the line of fire has tried to avoid all memory of the once shameful act of his former life and by doing so becomes destined to repeat his mistakes.

Lord Jim is far more expansive than the story it sets out to tell, ultimately giving a warning on the nature of history and general humanity that only a writer of Conrad's statue could hope to help us understand.

If there is a flaw it is not one to be taken literally. Conrad was a master of structural experimentation and with Lord Jim he starts with a standard third person narrative to relate the background and personalities of his characters and then somehow merges this into a second person narrative of a man, years from the events he is relating, telling of the legend of Jim. It is a brilliant innovation that starts off a little awkward and might lead to confusion in spots as the story verges into its most important parts under the uncertain guidence of a narrator who, for all his insight into others, seems unwilling to relate his personal relevence to the story he is relating.

Nevertheless (with a heartfelt refrain), one of the best books I have ever read.

This is a fascinating book. Although it is difficult to understand, if one reads carefully and even discovers the basic plot, it is an incredibly rewarding experience. When I first read it I didn't know whether I should laugh or cry. I recommend this book to anyone who read Heart of Darkness and is interested in the further adventures of the philisopical and self-reflective Marlow. This is an awesome book.

A Grand Ungodly Godlike Narrator, November 22, 2008

By Giordano Bruno (Wherever I am, I am.) - See all my reviews

That title is a knock-off of Ishmael's description of Captain Ahab in Melville's Moby Dick. My guess is that Joseph Conrad never read Moby Dick. His writing career unfolded during the decades before the rediscovery of Melville. I have no doubt that Conrad would have burst with appreciation if he'd encountered the other "greatest" writer of sea tales in English or any language. Lord Jim begins to remind me of Moby Dick in chapter four, when the straightforward 3rd person narrative suddenly shifts to Conrad's typically indirect narration in the first person voice of Captain Marlow. Thereafter, Jim's whole adventure is embedded in Marlow's rambling discourse, to the utter despair of high school sophomores and middle-age armchair travelers who "just want the story, ma'm."

So who is Marlow? Is he just a convenient mask for Conrad? Why is so much text devoted to Marlow's musing about his own "peripheral" role in the story and his own unresolved understanding of Jim? Does "Jim" really exist, outside of Marlow's penchant for entertaining friends with bizarre anecdotes? (The last few chapters, cast as a letter from Marlow to a friend, would seem to be intended to 'document' the truth of the tale.) Dear reader, you've better notice that Jim is remarkably inarticulate in Marlow's account; when he speaks, he almost never finishes a sentence, never establishes a discourse on his own terms. The Jim we get to know is as much a projection of Marlow's ego as Jesus of Nazareth was of the Apostle Paul's. And then, of course, we still have to wonder about the invisible author behind the so-obtrusive narrator.

What I'm arguing here is that the novel Lord Jim is about as much about the title character as Moby Dick is about the whale. Ahab's quest for ineffable vengeance by death is almost exactly parallel to Jim's quest for redemption by death. Both are ripping good adventure tales that COULD be told in eighty-page novellas or made into films from which the narrative voices are stripped and scattered on the floor of the editing studio. But just as the main character in Moby Dick is Ishmael, Marlow is the heart of obscurity in Lord Jim. To really relish either book, the reader has to take the narrator's epiphanies seriously.

Are we on any kind of solid ground in saying that Melville's novel is about a socially orphaned Ishmael projecting his need for a father Ahab? Shall we then risk the notion that Conrad's novel is about a psychologically impotent Marlow projecting his need for a son on Tuan Jim? Hey, reader! If you steal my notion and write a grad seminar paper with it, don't forget to vote "helpful" on my review!

This is an absurdly great novel, a book to read thoughtfully with mounting involvement until you can't attend to anything else before finishing it, a book to read again and again as your life changes perspective on itself. If you have doubts about Conrad's mastery of the English language, listen to this description:

"... we watched the moon float away above the chasm between the hills like an ascending spirit out of a grave; its sheen descended, cold and pale, like the ghost of dead sunlight. There is something haunting in the light of the moon... It is to our sunshine, which -- say what you like -- is all we have to live by, what the echo is to the sound: misleading and confusing whether the note by mocking or sad." That extended metaphor, to my mind, sets up perfectly the mood and the narrative thrust of Marlow's first long 'confessional' conversation with the disgraced sailor Jim, in which self-mockery and sadness afflict both parties.

I'd forgotten, or never realized, how deep this novel is, since I first read it perhaps twenty years ago. I hope I can come upon it with the same freshness and astonishment when I read it again, perhaps twenty years from now.

Young Jim was probably never meant for the sea. As described by Joseph Conrad, the title character of "Lord Jim" had no real love for ocean voyage or relish for adventure except when it was inside his own head. His "dreams and the success of his imaginary achievements" were "the best parts of life, its secret truth, its hidden reality." His passage to the Far East was destined to prove a ticket to failure, and so it was, when he abandoned a foundering vessel filled with pilgrims to save himself.

Now his shame is the stuff of conversation in every roadstead and harbor between India and Australia. Can the chastened dreamer manage to recover his lost sense of honor in a distant land where no white man will come to tell of his past mistake?

"Lord Jim" may be set in the Pacific, but its ideas are universal, as Conrad takes on the contradictions behind the Western concepts of honor and bravery. Published in 1900, the novel feels like the start of the modern literary era in both its loose, ambling structure and its questioning of the base convictions of right and wrong still girding society today. "Lord Jim" hasn't lost much of anything in the 105 years since it was published. If anything, it's more relevant than ever.

Who is Jim? Is he a hero, a coward, or a victim? Is he all three? Part of the problem pegging him is the fact the fellow doing most of the talking about him, cagey Marlow the narrator, doesn't seem too sure himself. That ambiguity is another way in which the novel is modern. At one point Marlow even seems to suggest Jim is no more than a figment of his imagination.

"He existed for me, and after all it is only through me that he exists for you," he tells his anonymous group of listeners at one point. It's interesting Marlow is only identified by his last name and Jim by his first. Are they two halves of the same person?

While playing with the metaphysics of identity and of right and wrong make "Lord Jim" vital and important, Conrad's deep engagement in humanity's many odd and nasty facets makes it fun. He creates a myriad of secondary characters inhabiting the backwaters of the West Indies, of varying moral shadings, finding amusement in even the cruelest.

One singular nogoodnik tells Marlow he wants the disgraced Jim to work for him on a barren island harvesting guano. It's not much of an offer, he knows, but there is one benefit: "Anyhow, I could guarantee the island wouldn't sink under him - and I believe he is a bit particular on that point."

"Lord Jim" is a great book not for its message so much as its lived-in depth, a sense we are really there on Marlow's steamy veranduh amid casuarina trees or aboard a creaking brigantine sailing placid under a crepuscular sky. Conrad really engages you as a reader, and while he plays with the narrative structure, and allows the story to drift quite a bit, often frustrating me and other readers at least the first time through, the book remains engaging and illustrative about both its theme and subject.

Dark? Yes, but not oppressively so. In a way, Conrad is taking a humanistic approach to a nihilistic question, asking what good notions of honor and glory really do mankind when most of us aren't fated to join life's immortals. Do we have the right to expect more of ourselves than life itself allows?

At one point, when a minor character obsessed with his sense of honor kills himself, Conrad asks a burning question worth keeping in mind: "Who can tell what flattering he had induced himself to take of his own suicide?"

This is the central question explored by Conrad in Lord Jim. Jim is ultimately a character who inspires our sympathy due to his inability to find reconcilliation for his one tragic moment of weakness. In him we find a person of tremendous potential that remains unrealized as the tragic circumstances of his abandoning his post aboard the Patna continually haunt him and the associated guilt drives him to isolation.
Conrad successfully explores the concepts of bravery, cowardice,guilt and the alternative destinies that an individual may be driven to by these qualities.
The narrative can be a bit confusing at times as Marlowe relates the tale by recalling his encounters with Jim. The book reminded very much of Somerset Maugham's THE RAZOR"S EDGE" in style. However I believe that Maugham did a much better job of incorporating the narrator into the flow of the story. Overall LORD JIM is a wonderful classic novel that I highly recommend.

Like other reviewers I was introduced to this book at a young age. Although I was too young to understand much, it intrigued me then as it intrigues me now - this prototypical theme about one who leaves the numbing monotony of uninspired domestic life for the romanticism of going to sea and distant lands. Certainly, the romanticism of youth and then the subsequent disillusionment of experience, in this case a bitter twist of fate, was a subject of grave concern for Conrad, and that concern is sounded in the powerful language that comes out through the narrator Marlow. As Marlow relates, "There is a magnificent vagueness in the expectations that had driven each of us to sea, such a glorious indefiniteness, such a beautiful greed of adventures... in no other kind of life is the beginning all illusion - the disenchantment more swift - the subjugation more complete". Or this: "Yet you, too, in your time must have known the intensity of life, that light of glamour created in the shock of trifles, as amazing as the glow of sparks struck from a cold stone - and as short-lived, alas." Stein, the merchant and butterfly collector had an enigmatic answer to this romanticism: "in the destructive element submit."

Of interest here is the historical context within which this book was written. It appears as if an actual historical incident, the abandonment by the crew of the British ship Jeddah carrying pilgrims bound for Mecca in 1880, serves as a basis for the story. It was during a time when Great Britain had amassed a great overseas empire and had come to dominate the trade routes to the East; and also when racist attitudes abounded, supported by the science of the day. At one point, Marlow pauses in his narrative to wonder if all this enterprise into foreign lands could have arisen solely out of greed, and cannot come up with any other motives other than to benefit loved ones back home.

Jim's downfall has a great deal to do with the fringe characters that cross his path. None of the crew of the Patna seem to be anything but self-indulgent and self-serving; exactly the kind of people one would expect to run for their lives rather than face a responsibility for something larger than themselves. It was Jim's fate as a youth to suffer the inaction of being pulled along with these cowards. Marlow went out of his way to extend his sympathy to Jim, seeing in him a different sensibility, as "one of us". But then again, although it's not exactly clear - "obscured in mists" as Marlow would say, he had something in common with that crew. He seems to have had his head in the clouds, thinking about his own adventures rather than his duty to the passengers. Later, when he is banished to Patusan and becomes a revered figure to the natives there and is on his way to redeeming himself and finding love - at least in that one corner of the world - he crosses paths with two outcasts, the egomaniac pirate Gentleman Brown and the abject Cornelius. Then a twist of fate...

The best book on the nature of courage I've ever read. Unfortunately, to appreciate it (and many other Conrad novels), you need to have a fair bit of experience in life. I tried to read Conrad at 13, then at 20. It seemed boring and I could not quite relate to his heroes, but now, when I am a bit older, I found his books and this one in particular, really interesting. This is not a page turner. I found myself reading pieces of 10-20 pages, then putting the book aside and taking some time to think. All in all, this is a really good book.

Joseph Conrad's tale of Lord Jim is a warning against taking yourself too seriously, expecting too much of yourself, failing to forgive yourself.

Jim is such a noble character but is he just another manifestation of Dostoevsky's 'The Idiot' - too honourable to be a survivor. Of course Conrad conspires greatly against Jim. With Jim's first great mistake - the one that, in his eyes, blighted him forever, it is as if God himself pardoned Jim, absolved him of any blame because there were no victims. And yet Jim cannot put the unfortunate aside push on with an effective life. But that's not quite true - eventually he does find a place for himself and the rest was up to Conrad's masterful plotting.

I also enjoy immensely the method Conrad uses of telling a tale through the eyes of an observer - Marlowe. While we are all participants in life, we are also very much more observers - if we care to observe.

other recommendations:

'Victory', 'Chance' - Joseph Conrad

'Virgin Soil' - Turgenev