In an example of situational irony, George (one of the engineers aboard the Patna) tries to stay alive by fleeing from the damaged ship during the storm—only to die from a heart attack in the process. Marlow’s commentary on the man’s death highlights the irony of this moment:
“Weak heart. The man had been complaining of being out of sorts for some time before. Excitement. Over-exertion. Devil only knows. Ha! ha! ha! It was easy to see he did not want to die either. Droll, isn’t it? May I be shot if he hadn’t been fooled into killing himself! Fooled—neither more nor less.”
Marlow laughs before noting how “[i]t was easy to see [George] did not want to die” and stating that the man was “fooled into killing himself.” Marlow sees how it is “droll” (or comical) that George would have survived had he not tried to stay alive, since the Patna did not end up sinking after all. In other words, had George acted heroically by staying with the ship rather than abandoning the 800 passengers on board, he might not have died.
George’s ironic death acts a sort of warning to Jim, hinting to him that being selfish can lead to one’s ruin. Unlike George, Jim does not run away from his problems when he gets into trouble at the end of the novel, instead facing them head on and dying while taking accountability for his actions in Patusan.
In a subtle example of situational irony, Jim leaves his comfortable home in England in order to become a hero and find success—hoping to impress his family and community back home—only to end up finding that kind of “success” on a remote island unknown to the outside world. In other words, while Jim becomes a hero in Patusan—earning the title of “Lord Jim” in the process—this kind of success is not legible to the people back home (who, because of their colonial mindsets, look down on the residents of Southeast Asia) and also not something they would easily hear about in the first place.
The irony of Jim’s situation comes across in the following passage, in which Marlow describes the lack of external validation for Jim’s success:
“The conquest of love, honour, men’s confidence—the pride of it, the power of it, are fit materials for a heroic tale; only our minds are struck by the externals of such a success, and to Jim’s successes there were no externals. Thirty miles of forest shut it off from the sight of an indifferent world, and the noise of the white surf along the coast overpowered the voice of fame.”
As Marlow notes, “there were no externals” when it came to Jim’s heroism in Patusan—“thirty miles of forest” and “the noise of the white surf” kept him from experiencing the kind of “fame” that he had always craved.
Near the end of the novel, Marlow describes a conversation he had with Jewel about whether Jim is planning to leave Patusan or not, using a simile and a metaphor in the process:
“Why did I come, then? After a slight movement [Jewel] was as still as a marble statue in the night. I tried to explain briefly: friendship, business; if I had any wish in the matter it was rather to see him stay. . . . ‘They always leave us,’ she murmured. The breath of sad wisdom from the grave which her piety wreathed with flowers seemed to pass in a faint sigh. . . . Nothing, I said, could separate Jim from her.”
The simile here—in which Marlow describes how Jewel “was as still as a marble statue” while waiting to hear why Marlow came back to Patusan—captures the intensity of Jewel's anxiety about Marlow possibly coming to take Jim back with him. She is so scared that her husband might be leaving her that she cannot move or breathe.
The metaphor in this passage is a bit more complex. When Marlow describes “the grave which [Jewel’s] piety wreathed with flowers” he is capturing something important about the effects of colonialism. Because Jewel is so used to white colonizers coming to Patusan, taking what they want, and then leaving, she is preparing herself to lose Jim (if he were to go back to Europe), and, Marlow imagines, has already built a grave for him inside of her mind and heart.
The ultimate irony, of course, is that Jim ends up in a literal grave (after choosing to stay in Patusan) rather than in a metaphorical one (if he had left Jewel and gone home to Europe). This situational irony becomes clear at the end of the novel when Jim is killed by Doramin after failing to protect the Malay community from Brown’s attack.
