Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Lord Jim, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Fantasy vs. Reality
Justice and Duty
Racism and Colonialism
Truth and Perspective
Summary
Analysis
Marlow has finally finished telling the long story of Jim’s life at the dinner party in the present day. His audience breaks up, and some go to the veranda. Many of the men in attendance have their own reactions to the story, but only one man ever hears the full ending. Marlow writes to this man two years later, sending him a thick packet. The “privileged reader” who receives the letter looks out his window at a lighthouse. He notices that Marlow’s packet contains three items: many pages pinned together in Marlow’s handwriting, a gray paper with unfamiliar handwriting, and a letter of explanation from Marlow. As the man inspects further, the explanatory letter has yet another letter with it.
Marlow’s speech at the dinner party, which spans over 30 chapters, makes up the bulk of the novel. The last few chapters, however, take a different form (although they’re still mostly told in Marlow’s voice). For most of the people at the dinner party, Jim’s story has a happy ending, despite the suggestions of some growing cracks in this happiness. While there is certainly an element of truth to this ending—Jim really does blossom in Patusan—the “privileged reader” will get an even more truthful ending to the story.
Themes
Literary Devices
The privileged reader begins reading Marlow’s letter. In it, Marlow writes that the privileged reader seemed interested in Jim’s fate and assumes that the man hasn’t forgotten Jim’s story. At the time, the man didn’t believe Jim had truly mastered his fate, despite Marlow’s claims otherwise. The man told Marlow that for Jim to give up his life for “them” was brutish (with Marlow inferring that “them” meant “all of mankind with skins brown, yellow, black in colour”). The man, according to Marlow’s letter, believed that such a sacrifice was only permissible if one maintained proper ideas about race.
The word “privileged” may have a double meaning, since reader is “privileged” to be able to hear the end of the story but also seemingly living a "privileged,” wealthy lifestyle, benefitting from colonialism without having to see its horrors firsthand. It is interesting that Marlow specifically chooses to give his letter to the most racist person at the party—this could reflect the novel’s overall intention to combat racist ideas by telling a story that undermines them.
Themes
In his letter, Marlow recalls how Jim tried to write him once. Jim signed the letter from “The Fort, Patusan,” suggesting that he had begun to fortify himself against possible attacks. In the letter, Jim begins writing with a splotchy hand that something terrible has happened, but that’s as far as he gets.
Jim’s letter is yet another unfinished project in his life. His reference to his house as a fort (which, as Marlow knows from his visit, it clearly is not) shows that even after so much time in Patusan, Jim hasn’t lost his romantic way of looking at the world.
Themes
In his letter, Marlow explains that one of the other letters enclosed in the packet is from Jim’s father, and that Jim kept the letter carefully preserved in his writing desk. Jim’s father wrote the letter a few days before Jim joined the Patna, so this means Jim kept it with him for a long time. In the letter, Jim’s father advises Jim not to judge people too quickly or severely, then he updates Jim about various people’s lives and about some of Jim’s old pets. Marlow closes his letter by saying that he has heard the final events of Jim’s story and can imagine them so vividly that he feels like an eyewitness, even though he is putting it all together from fragments.
The packet that Marlow sends comes in many parts, providing a physical manifestation of how the story becomes more fractured near the end. As Marlow himself is not there to witness the events, he increasingly takes on the role of a journalist, or even a detective, piecing Jim’s story together from evidence and testimony by others who were there to witness what Marlow couldn’t witness himself.
Themes
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