Lord Jim is a modernist novel that plays with the conventions and tropes of romantic adventure novels. Modernism as a literary movement emerged in the early 20th century as writers began to challenge certain literary conventions, such as centering stories on likable, heroic characters and organizing novels chronologically. Conrad is considered to be one of the first modernist writers and, as such, his work contains remnants of the Romantic style while also incorporating some new elements of experimentation.
Conrad’s decision to center his story on a young man craving the opportunity to be a hero ties this story to the adventure novels that came before it. At the same time, however, Conrad does not allow Jim to ever fully accomplish his goal. Not only does he abandon all of the 800 passengers on board the Patna when he believes the ship is sinking (rather than saving them as a hero might), he also dies at the end of the novel after failing to protect his community in Patusan. Though Jim does become a leader in the community before his death—thus earning the name “Lord Jim”—he is not given the happy ending that many heroes in adventure and romance novels were typically granted.
Lord Jim also belongs in the modernist genre because of the ways that Conrad plays with narration. While the first few chapters have a third-person omniscient narrator, Conrad abruptly shifts the bulk of the novel into Marlow’s perspective, having the man narrate most of the 250-page tale while at a dinner party and then in letters to one of the more skeptical attendees of that party. Marlow was, of course, not present for Jim’s experience on the Patna or for the bulk of his time in Patusan, and he has scraped together different accounts from the people in Jim’s life in order to construct the story of Jim’s life and death. This sort of questioning of what is “true” versus what is one person’s (or several people’s) perspective is typical of modernist literature.
