While the first four chapters of the novel are told from the perspective of an omniscient narrator, the remainder of the book is (primarily) narrated by the character Marlow, both via an extended address to attendees of a dinner party (Chapters 5 through 35) and in letters to one of the attendees of the party (Chapters 36 through 45). Because Marlow has learned much of the information he shares secondhand and tells it far after the fact, his narration acts as a frame story.
Conrad’s decision to have Marlow frame Jim’s story is intentional. As a modernist writer, Conrad is raising questions about the nature of truth and encouraging writers to consider whose perspective they can or should trust. Can readers trust Marlow because he has consulted many different sources before telling Jim’s story, or would the full truth only be able to come from Jim himself? The following passage—which comes just after Marlow finishes telling his 30-chapters-long tale that extends from when he met Jim to when he leaves him for the final time in Patusan—hints at how Conrad wants readers to engage with Marlow’s frame story:
With these words Marlow had ended his narrative, and his audience had broken up forthwith, under his abstract, pensive gaze. Men drifted off the verandah in pairs or alone without loss of time, without offering a remark, as if the last image of that incomplete story, its incompleteness itself, and the very tone of the speaker, had made discussion in vain and comment impossible. Each of them seemed to carry away his own impression, to carry it away with him like a secret.
Here, the attendees of the dinner party who have been listening to Marlow’s extended story are stand-ins for the novel’s readers who have also been listening to the story. The ways that the listeners “drifted” away to meditate on “that incomplete story” indicates Conrad’s desire to have readers reflect on this “incompleteness” as well, ultimately coming to their own conclusions about whether or not Marlow can be trusted.
