Lord Jim
by Joseph Conrad
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Lord Jim: Unreliable Narrator 1 key example

Key Examples in Lord Jim

Chapter 45
Explanation and Analysis—Marlow:

Despite the fact that Marlow knows Jim personally and has pieced together the facts of Jim’s life story from Jim himself, Stein, and Gentleman Brown, he remains an unreliable narrator. This is because, as Conrad makes clear, each of Marlow's sources is biased in their own way: Jim romanticizes the events of his own life for dramatic effect (as a young man in search of adventure and fame), Stein is losing his cognitive faculties and also tends to speak in oblique and vague ways, and Brown is a dying, violent pirate who only wants to present himself in the best light. When filtered through Marlow’s own myopic lens, the stories he hears and regurgitates for dramatic effect don’t seem all that trustworthy. When Marlow directly quotes people he has never met (such as the crew members of the Patna who worked with Jim), for example, readers are meant to be somewhat skeptical.