A Sense of Inexpressible and Incomprehensible Mystery: How 'Lord Jim' Revitalizes the Seafaring Novel Laura Byrnes College

Through his exploration of narration in ‘Lord Jim’, Conrad can present readers with a novel which goes beyond the colonialist tropes of the seafaring tale. Marlow’s first-person narration orally relays the narrative for most of the novel, and his sympathetic association with Jim places readers in a position where they are forced to question whether they too fall short of romantic expectations of society which develops this mysterious tone that permeates throughout the novel. ‘Lord Jim’ is more much than a seafaring narrative, it offers a complex introspective analysis of Conrad’s society and whether it was as heroic as it claimed, and the restraints of this if were.

Marlow is an outstanding and perplexing narrator who, through Conrad’s decision to tell most of this story through oral narration, directly engages with the reader, asking if ‘any of you [them] had ever heard of Patusan?’ or claims that Jim is ‘one of us.’ Through the latter statement, Marlow draws associations between himself and Jim, but also between Jim and the readers. Marlow’s language is dense with terms such as ‘inscrutable,’ and ‘inexplicable,’ which implies that he is struggling to define the moral of Jim’s story. This because Jim’s story expands much...