Fantasy vs. Reality
The title character of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim is, above all, a romantic. When Marlow, the sea captain who relates Jim’s story, calls Jim a romantic, he usually means romance in the way it’s used to describe adventure stories about daring feats at sea or knights in shining armor. Jim comes from a relatively comfortable upbringing, but he has big dreams about going on his own adventures and performing noble deeds. The problem…
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Justice and Duty
Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim deals with justice both in the strict legal sense, as well as in the harder-to-define moral sense. The first part of the novel largely focuses on the legal trial where Marlow first witnesses Jim. Jim is on trial for failing his duty as a sailor, having abandoned the passengers traveling on the Patna in order to save his own life (only to find out later that the Patna didn’t actually…
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Racism and Colonialism
Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim is a novel about the consequences of racism and colonialism. Race is a controversial topic in Conrad’s work, with some critics accusing Conrad of perpetuating racist stereotypes. However, if the reader takes the book at face value, it seems clear that violent European characters like the scoundrel Gentleman Brown are meant to be villains, whereas innocent characters like Jim’s part-Malay wife Jewel are meant to inspire sympathy in the reader…
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Truth and Perspective
Most of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim is narrated by Marlow, who wants to tell the full and true version of Jim's life. The problem, however, is that Marlow has limited information and so must piece together the truth from multiple sources, not all of which are reliable or fully detailed. Jim, for instance, romanticizes his version of events that he tells Marlow, while Stein is guarded and oblique, and Brown is openly…
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