In the 1992 article Lord Jim: After the Truth, Ross C.

Murfin notes that the book "was

generally well received" on its first publication in 1900. Murfin says that reviewers were fond
of "the novel's romance, the faraway feelings it evoked, and the original poetry of Conrad's
language." However, they "decidedly did not like Conrad's way of telling his story, the odd
narrative method that gives structure to the novel." The anonymous reviewer in the New York
Tribune notes that even though the book "is a long narrative it should be read, if possible, at a
sitting. because Mr. Conrad's mode of composition demands it." However, this reviewer was
ultimately able to look past what could be an inconvenience and declared Lord Jim "a book
of great originality, and it exerts a spell such as is rarely encountered in modern fiction."
Another anonymous reviewer, for the Spectator, called the book "a strange narrative" and
named it "Mr. Conrad's latest and greatest work."

Reviewers throughout the twentieth century had various reactions to the work, which was in
retrospect identified as a modernist creation for its tendency to break the narrative
conventions of the day. Although many early critics were confused by Conrad's ambiguous
narrative structure, later critics, such as Paul B. Armstrong in the 1950s, note that Marlow
"paradoxically feels at times that he knows less about Jim the more he acquires opinions
about him. Each interpretation seems 'true,' at least to some extent." Another critic from the
1950s, Albert J. Guerard, notes the ambiguity of the novel but talks about the "psycho-moral"
implications, which have "no easy solution."

In 1979, Ian Watt, in Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, drew attention to the sources that
Conrad used in his composition, following the progression of the novel from its first
appearance as a small sketch. Watt believes that understanding this path is important "because
it provides some initial clues both to the narrative form and the thematic development of the
novel." In Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan's 1991 book, Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper, the
author notes that "A somewhat crude but useful distinction can be made between 'first
generation' and 'second generation' critics of the novel." Erdinast-Vulcan identifies this first
generation as focusing on creating "a stable ethical code by which Jim's story is to be judged,"
while she sees the second-generation critics regarding the novel as an unsolvable, "modernist
expression." For her part, Erdinast-Vulcan sees the novel as an attempt to defeat the modern
temper "by a regression to a mythical mode of discourse," using the term "'identifiction' to
denote a literary text or genre on which a fictional character construes his or her identity." In
other words, Conrad relies on traditional forms to tell Jim's story, which is romanticized to fit
the genre.

Questions of Jim's authenticity and what, in fact, Conrad intended the novel to mean have
plagued the book throughout its existence, although, as with the early critics, most modern
critics acknowledge Conrad's literary artistry. The book has so captivated critical and public
minds that in 2000, on the book's one hundredth anniversary, leading Conrad scholars were
called together for a special publication, Lord Jim: Centennial Essays. As Allan H. Simmons,
one of the editors of the book, notes in his essay, "'He Was Misleading': Frustrated Gestures
in Lord Jim":

Ultimately, the novel is based on a paradox that invites us to admire commitment to an ideal
that can never be justified: the quest for an underlying moral truth that will somehow explain
Jim implies the belief that such a truth exists; yet the belief itself is unsustainable.