This immortal novel of the sea tells the story of a British sailor haunted by a single youthful act of cowardly betrayal. To the white men in Bombay, Calcutta, and Rangoon, Jim is a man of mystery. To the primitive natives deep in the Malayan jungle, he is a god gifted with supernatural powers. To the beautiful half-caste girl who flees to his hut for protection, he is a lord to be feared and … loved.
Lord Jim—Conrad’s classic portrait of a man’s guilt, his search for forgiveness, and his final, tragic redemption—is a work of enduring value and one of the world’s great masterpieces.
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Lord Jim came along in 1900 and is the work of Joseph Conrad the Romanticist who, having written Heart of Darkness, was one step closer to evolving into Conrad the Modernist. Heart of Darkness — everybody knows by now — is deeply marred and here’s why: it romanticizes white efforts to colonize Africa and force Western culture on an entire continent while taking control of its lands, resources, people and economy. In Heart of Darkness, Conrad tried and failed to write about the superman, a person who can go anywhere on earth, be recognized instantly as a superior being and be automatically placed in charge. Rudyard Kipling did it first in The Man Who Would Be King (1888). But Conrad’s story is about the spiritual cost of overreaching and the horror of the breakdown that follows when the weight of the responsibility of being the superman catches up and can’t be reconciled with a crushing recognition of our pitiful humanness. Which is why Francis Ford Coppola thought Mr. Kurtz’s story was a perfect metaphor for our tragic overreaching as a nation in Vietnam and made Apocalypse Now. In Lord Jim, Conrad is apparently over the fit of passion about the superman and does a better job with his material. But he isn’t over his fascination with what makes the difference between the most capable man and the least. Within the male psyche, it seems there’s one inarguable prime directive: the worst type of man is the survivor, the best is the warrior. The male mind is constantly interrogating each thought, feeling and action in an attempt to root out and crush anything not warrior-worthy. That’s what Lord Jim is about. When Jim is young, he ships out as a mate on a freighter that takes on a charter to ferry hundreds of Indian families across a strait. Partway across, the ship strikes a reef that stoves in the bow so badly it seems the ship will be on the bottom in minutes. So the captain and crew, having decided only fools hang around to suffer the worst disaster in recent memory, grab a lifeboat and flee. All except Jim. He can’t do it. He can’t leave. But then he does, choosing his life over those of a bunch of dark-skinned foreigners. Fast-forward several years: It turns out the ferry never sank. But everyone knows about the incident and Jim has not had a happy moment since. He keeps moving, taking on more and more dangerous oceanic voyages all the time. And nobody can understand how anyone can be as bold, as fearless, as careless with his life as Jim. Finally, a company he is with is attacked by pirates and Jim is the only one with the nerve to walk right into their midst and negotiate a deal. This time, Conrad has hit on a twisted truth about the superman: it turns out some forms of courage may in fact be self-hatred. Jim’s not brave. He knows he’s a coward, thus his life is worth nothing to him.