Lord Jim Reading Order

Lord Jim (1900) by Joseph Conrad is one of the most formally complex and morally searching novels of the early twentieth century — an account of a young English merchant officer named Jim who abandons his ship (and its passengers) during what he believes to be a sinking, and then spends the rest of his life trying to recover his honor in the remote jungles of Southeast Asia. Conrad tells the story primarily through Marlow, the first-person narrator who appears in several of his works, who encounters Jim in a series of conversations and investigations and tries to understand what happened and what Jim is — whether his failure was cowardice or something more complicated. Conrad's technique — the multiple narrators, the fractured chronology, the way the central event (the jumping from the Patna) is approached obliquely and never quite fully rendered — is itself an argument about the impossibility of knowing another person's interior life. Marlow is fascinated by Jim partly because Jim resembles the kind of hero Marlow might have wanted to be (or was) — an English gentleman whose self-image depends on a code of honor that turns out to be inadequate to the situation in which he finds himself. Jim's eventual redemption in Patusan — where he becomes the trusted leader of a remote community — is undercut by the novel's ending, in which his refusal to betray his principles leads directly to the deaths of innocent people and his own execution. Conrad refuses to let Jim's story end in either simple condemnation or simple vindication.