1901- The Edwardian named for King Edward VII and spans the time from Queen

1914: Period Victoria's death (1901) to the beginning of World War I (1914).
During this time, the British Empire was at its height and the
wealthy lived lives of materialistic luxury. However, four
fifths of the English population lived in squalor. The writings
of the Edwardian Period reflect and comment on these social
conditions. For example, writers such as George Bernard Shaw
and H.G. Wells attacked social injustice and the selfishness of
the upper classes. Other writers of the time include William
Butler Yeats, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, Henry James,
and E.M. Forster.

Joseph Conrad was born in the Ukraine in 1857. His father was a Polish revolutionary, so Joseph spent his
youth with several different relatives in several different places. In 1874, he first went to sea. For the next
twenty years he made his living as a sailor, joining the English merchant service in 1878 and eventually
becoming a ship captain. In his twenties, after joining the English fleet, Conrad anglicized his Slavic name
and learned English. He did not begin to write until he was in his forties. Lord Jim is the first of his major
novels. It appeared in 1900, the year after Heart of Darkness, which is perhaps his best-known work. Conrad
was only moderately successful during his lifetime, although he moved in prominent literary circles and was
friends with people like Henry James and Ford Maddox Ford; with the latter he coauthored several works.

Conrad was writing at the very moment when the Victorian Age was disappearing and the modern era
was emerging. Victorian moral codes still influenced the plots of novels, but such principles were no
longer absolute. Novelists and poets were beginning to experiment with form. The jumbled time
sequence and elaborate narrative frames of Lord Jim are part of this movement. As Conrad wrote in the
preface to The Nigger of the 'Narcissus', another of his novels, fiction wanted to "strenuously aspire to the
plasticity of sculpture, to the colour of painting, and to the magic suggestiveness of music." Lord Jim, with its
insistence on the frequent inability of language to communicate straightforwardly, opens itself to new
ways of using words. A term as elusive as "inscrutable" may contain within itself the immediately
comprehensible essence of the novel's protagonist, while a simple word like "water" may fracture into a
multiplicity of meanings, each one available to only a single individual.

The sun hadn't set yet on Victoria's empire, however; in fact, it was at its zenith. While this is one of Conrad's
novels least involved in the set of issues surrounding colonialism, Lord Jim nevertheless situates itself in a
world where national differences are often reduced to the dichotomy of "us" and "them," where the
term "us" can encompass a surprisingly heterogeneous group. Both economic and racial versions of the
colonial dynamic come into play in this novel.

When Conrad died in 1924, the first World War had come and gone, and modernism dominated literature.
The new world was one in which a novel like Lord Jim, in which an older set of ideals about heroism do
combat with a modern sense of troubled personal identity, could no longer be written with serious intent.
Works like The Great Gatsby and The Sound and the Fury, which feature the same sort of conflict, present the
struggle as absurd and futile, and no longer profound. Lord Jim comes out of a unique and very specific
moment in time.

Lord Jim
Lord Jim is remarkable for its elaborately woven scheme of narration, which is similar in many ways to that
of The Good Soldier, a novel written by Conrad's friend and collaborator Ford Maddox Ford. The narrative
comes to the reader primarily through Marlow, a world-weary sea captain who identifies deeply with Jim's
fallibilities. Marlow has complete control over the story, though, and he exercises his power in increasingly
complicated ways. Time is broken up: in a single paragraph of narration, Marlow will reference the past, the
present, and the future. By manipulating the flow of the narrative, Marlow is able to create juxtapositions and
contrasts that highlight particular aspects of the story. He is a master at withholding information: Jim's final
fate becomes a matter for discussion eight chapters before the reader learns what that fate actually is. This
creates suspense, of course, but it also allows Marlow to shape the reader's eventual reaction when he or she
does receive the relevant information. Marlow also offers the reader narrative blocks from a variety of
sources, of differing degrees of reliability. Much of the story has come from Jim, but significant sections have
come from other characters or have been pieced together by Marlow based on inference. Information is
conveyed by letters, midnight conversations, deathbed interviews, forwarded manuscripts, and, most
significantly, in the form of a tale told to an audience of listeners. The narrative occasionally breaks to show
Marlow telling Jim's story to a group of acquaintances at a much later date. Temporally, this scene of
storytelling takes place after Jim's arrival in Patusan but before the arrival of Gentleman Brown and Jim's
eventual defeat. Marlow must thus leave the story unfinished for a time. He completes it by sending a
manuscript to one member of his audience. This shift from an oral mode of storytelling to a written form of
narrative is significant. A storyteller has the power to shape his material to match his audience's response; a
writer, on the other hand, who works in solitude, must offer his distant reader a predetermined message.

Marlow constantly ponders the "message"--the meaning of Jim's story. His language is dense with terms like
"inscrutable" and "inexplicable," words that denote imprecision and indecipherability, but which also
possess a certain quality of uncertainty in themselves, as words. He struggles to name things, and is often
reduced to wondering if there even is a meaning to Jim's story and his fascination with it. Sometimes he
concludes that the meaning is an "enigma"; sometimes he decides there is no meaning to be found at all.
Words are constantly being contested in this novel; at least three major episodes center around the
misinterpretation of a single spoken word. This uncertainty about language is the key feature of Conrad's
style. Conrad is the master of a high, elegiac language that seems to contain depths of profundity nearly
inexpressible in words. As one who did not learn English until he was in his twenties, he must certainly
have been aware of each and every word he used, and each must have been carefully chosen. His
language is often deliberately difficult, and in that quality his prose shares some of the features of
modernism. But his diction also matches, in its linguistic difficulty, the thematic and interpretive difficulty of
his material. This synthesis between form and content is powerful, making Conrad's prose a thing of tortured
beauty.

Even more tortured is the analysis of idealism and heroism that lies at the center of Lord Jim. Jim is a young
man who enters the world motivated primarily by fantasies of daring and noble deeds lifted from cheap
novels. His ideals break down, however, in the face of real danger; they are, in fact, untenable when applied to
any form of reality. This naïve idealism seems absurd when it leads to Jim's refusal to forget the Patna
incident, but it leads to real tragedy when he allows it to guide his conduct when Patusan is threatened. What
is honorable behavior in this world? Captain Brierly, who is presented as the prime example of success both
professionally and in terms of character, can't live with himself and commits suicide. Gentleman Brown, one
of the most self-possessed and self-scrutinizing of men, is nothing but a petty bandit. All these men are
connected by being what Marlow calls "one of us," but what does that term mean? Ideals are a troublesome
burden, and each character reveals to some degree a fear that he will be confronted with a situation in which
he must choose between ideals of conduct and a happy outcome.

Like many of Conrad's works, Lord Jim is set in a colonial world. The critique of colonialism is much less
central here, however, than in a novel like Heart of Darkness. Colonialism is most important as a backdrop to
the action and the moral struggles. In this world, the rules of "home" (i.e. European society) do not necessarily
apply, particularly when one is dealing with men who aren't white. National affiliations are much more
tenuous, too. Other allegiances--the idea of being "one of us" versus "one of them," for example--take their
place, altering expectations of honorable behavior. Most of all, though, Lord Jim is a novel about
storytelling, and in the confusion and convolutions of its narrative form are reflected the ambiguities of its
ideals and its setting.

In A Nutshell

They always tell you to "write what you know," right? Well, Joseph Conrad definitely took that one to heart.
He spent his early life sailing all over the world, and Lord Jim – like many of Conrad's other gems – is all
about the life of a sailor. And it ain't a pretty one, that's for sure.

To top off the whole based-in-reality thing, Lord Jim is actually inspired by a real-life event during which
some British sailors abandoned their damaged ship and its passengers in the South Pacific. It started as a
short story, but over the course of 1899 to 1900 Conrad published Lord Jim in thirteen issues of the
adventure-loving Blackwood's Magazine. Later in 1900, it was published as a novel and, well, we're still
reading it today. Fancy that.

Not everyone loves them some Conrad, we know. But that's okay: that's how it was when he was alive, too.
While many reviewers raved about the originality of Lord Jim, others expressed confusion or concern. A lot
of reviewers were either totally befuddled by Conrad or thought he was just writing a weird, longwinded
adventure novel that never quite gets on its feet.

Just look at this review from Public Opinion, published in November 1900:

Words cannot describe the weary effect of all this. The reader longs to get at some incidents, some definite
plot; all he finds is some introspective criticism and analysis of motive. (Source.)

If you find yourself thinking "Amen!" you're not alone. But Conrad was all about innovation, and as a
foreigner (he was Polish) he brought a unique and global perspective to the literature of the British
Empire. So it's no surprise that Lord Jim explores issues that crop up in nearly all of Conrad's other novels:
community and communal behavior codes, masculinity, national identity, imperial politics, life at sea,
and what it means to live an exciting, romantic (and sometimes not-so-romantic) life in the empire.

Yep, this novel is chock full of goodies for you to enjoy and analyze. Lord Jim is just waiting for you to
unpack it. And we're here to help.

 Why Should I Care?

We are confronted with evidence of people's questionable, bad, and just plain nuts behavior every day. Entire
media empires have been built on people behaving shamefully (we're looking at you, Real Housewives). And
YouTube has made it so that no social faux pas or furious rant goes unnoticed.

So what does all this have to do with Lord Jim? Well, Joseph Conrad's novel is a meditation on shame,
disillusionment, and what it means for the community and the individual when a disgraceful act is
committed. Our 24-hour news cycle and live-blogging culture might make it harder for bad behavior to go
unnoticed compared to times of yore, but the issues surrounding reputations, rumors, and secrets are nothing
new. Jim may not have to combat viral videos and instant replay, but he's subject to the age-old tendency to
gossip and never let a scandal die out quietly.

But Jim's behavior isn't so much offensive as it is cowardly. It goes against established ideas of what
"gentlemen" (or white British men of a certain social station) should be. Lord Jim doesn't just ask us to
think about the impact of bad behavior; it also asks us to consider why certain behavior is considered
scandalous to begin with and what that can tell us about the society that's doing the judging.

How It All Goes Down

Captain Marlow, professional sailor and amateur storyteller, decides to hold his own open mic night and tell
an audience all about the tragic tale of Jim. Back in the day Jim abandoned his sinking ship along with other
members of the crew. Jim turned himself in to authorities and went on trial for dereliction (abandonment) of
duty. Though publicly disgraced, Jim found a sympathetic buddy in Marlow. Jim told Marlow his whole,
sorry story, and Marlow tried to help Jim out over the next few years. Marlow found him jobs, but Jim always
quit and ran off again in an effort to escape his humiliation and shame.

Eventually Jim makes his way to the island of Patusan and becomes a local leader among the native people
there. He even lands himself a girlfriend. The good times don't last, though. A pirate named Gentleman Brown
shows up and wreaks havoc on the island, and Jim makes some bad judgment calls that result in a death.
Yikes. Once again Jim turns himself in to the authorities – this time the native leaders of the island. The father
of a man Jim inadvertently got killed shoots Jim and kills him. Marlow relates this incident in a letter to an
unknown recipient.

Adventure, Modernism, Psychological Thriller and Suspense

Adventure

At first glance, Lord Jim might not seem like adventure material. Frankly, the bulk of the novel involves
people sitting around and talking. Of course it's what they're talking about that matters, otherwise we might
have to write this one off as big ol' snooze. But at its heart, Lord Jim is an imperial adventure tale, filled
with swashbuckling, nautical hijinks, and even a little romance. And in its day, it was published in serial form
in Blackwood's Magazine, alongside stories and articles on hunting in Africa, deep-sea fishing, and exciting
battles. (Check out the "In a Nutshell" section for more on Blackwood's Magazine.)

The only snag we might hit in calling this one an adventure tale is the sad fact that Jim doesn't get to sail off
into the sunset with his girl in the end. Oh well. You can't have everything.
Modernism

What do we talk about when we talk about Modernism? "Modernist Literature" is a hefty phrase that pretty
much refers to literature written between 1899 and 1945, and involving experimentation with the
traditional novel format. Modernist literature plays all kinds of games with time and order, perspective,
and point of view. There was a lot of play with form, and it was more common to see a fragmented plot
than, say, a clear beginning, middle, and end.

Modernism and adventure don't normally go together, but in Lord Jim, they absolutely do. Conrad was a big
fan of experimenting with style, and many critics consider him a precursor to modernism. He used a lot
of modernist tricks in his narratives, including stream of consciousness; unreliable, biased narrators; a
focus on characters' inner lives; and a fairly cynical view of the world – all of which we see in Lord Jim at
one time or another. Plus, there is the whole fragmented nature of Jim's story, which is told in snippets
that are incomplete and out of order. We're left to do the dirty work of piecing it all together.

Psychological Thriller and Suspense

In Lord Jim, Conrad has a tricky habit of withholding information from us readers to build suspense.
Consider, for example, the beginning of the novel, where we get hint after hint of the Patna scandal and Jim's
role in it, but we don't find out what actually went down until several chapters in.

Add to that the novel's obsession with these characters' inner turmoil and you've got all the ingredients for
a psychological thriller. After all, Marlow is always trying to analyze Jim – to get inside his head, so to speak.
And we readers never quite know what Jim will do next, because we can see that his torment drives him to
make rash decisions. His actions haunt him his whole life, just as many characters' pasts do in your typical
thriller.

Who is the narrator, can she or he read minds, and, more importantly, can we trust her or him?

Third Person, Limited Omniscient/ Marlow. Or First Person.

We'll just level with you here: the narrative technique of Lord Jim is confusing to say the least.

First, we have Marlow, who is the main narrator of the novel. But as he tells Jim's story, other voices creep
into the mix as the characters he meets share what they know of Jim. It's as if Marlow is channeling a
story with multiple voices into one narrative stream. Plus, there's the fact Marlow is not actually the
narrator of the novel at all.

Yep, that's right. There's a whole other, unidentified person who is sitting on the verandah listening to
Marlow, and interrupting every once in a while to remind us that Marlow, too, is a character:

Marlow paused to put new life into his expiring cheroot, seemed to forget all about the story, and abruptly
began again. (8.10)

Weird, right? Plus, there's the anonymous narrator of the first five chapters, which document Jim's early
life. If your head is already spinning, don't worry. Shmoop has your back.
For the sake of sheer practicality, we're going to go ahead and call Lord Jim a first person narrative, because
the bulk of the novel is told in Marlow's words. As Conrad's go-to narrator (Marlow also narrated Conrad's
first novel, Chance, and his most famous novel, Heart of Darkness), Marlow has his work cut out for him.
Lord Jim has a great many stories woven together, and we need someone to tell them to us. That gargantuan
task falls to Marlow.

After the first four anonymously narrated chapters, we meet our storyteller at the end of Chapter Four. Every
chapter after that uses quotation marks around the paragraphs to indicate that Marlow is speaking. For much
of the novel, it's a pretty straightforward narrative; Marlow tells us Jim's story, and how he came to find out
about it (through his many, many sources, far and wide).

The only wrench that ever gets thrown is that pesky third person we've already mentioned. Why not have
Marlow just narrate the whole darn story?

Part of the reason might be thematic – Lord Jim is largely about storytelling, and Conrad uses multiple
storytellers throughout the narrative who all interpret one another and repeat one another. The novel shows us
how stories can get filtered and distorted through different people's perspectives, including Marlow's.

Also, the outside narrator means that Marlow functions both as a narrator and an independent character.
Bonus, right? Instead of seeing the whole world of Lord Jim through Marlow's eyes, we get one layer of
removal that gives us a good dose of perspective. Every time that other narrator rears his anonymous head,
we're reminded to take Marlow's words with a grain of salt, because he's only human.

Marlow's voice glides in and out of the story, and we get frequent instances where Marlow slips over to
quoting Jim, or Stein, or the French Lieutenant, or, well, you get the picture:

[W]hile his brain and his heart together were pierced as with daggers by panic-stricken screams, "Let go!
For God's sake, let go! Let go! She's going." Following upon that the boat-falls ripped through the blocks,
and a lot of men began to talk in startled tones under the awnings. "When these beggars did break out, their
yelps were enough to wake the dead," he said. (9.21)

Marlow is both paraphrasing Jim and quoting his young protege. How could he possibly know that Jim's brain
and heart were pierced with dagger-like screams? Either Marlow is projecting feelings onto Jim, or Jim has
described his experience this way, and Marlow is merely restating what he said (perhaps with a little color
added). This back-and-forth makes it difficult to suss out who is really saying what, and, more important,
who is feeling what.

As it turns out, another reason for not having Marlow be a first-person narrator may be Conrad's interest in
the way, by telling a story, we use and reinterpret other peoples voices. Jim's story is complicated, and
Marlow has to wrangle it out of various people, put it into his own words, then share it with an audience who
may go on to retell it in their own way.

The narrative technique puts us in the same position as Marlow's audience in the story, trying to sort
out what he and others are saying, wondering what's true. We're on shaky ground here, and we can't
help but think that's exactly where Conrad wants us.
Themes

 Language and Communication

Lord Jim is all about storytelling. There are stories within stories within stories and then some. As
characters tell their stories to our narrator, Marlow, they struggle to find the right words to say just
what they mean, and what they have witnessed. Marlow, on the other hand, never seems at a loss for
words as he retells their stories to his audience. Perhaps he's such a good storyteller because he is an
excellent listener. The dude remembers everything, and everything comes back to our protagonist, Jim. We
readers put each individual story that Marlow hears into the larger story of Jim – his rise and fall as a sailor,
and his rise and fall on Patusan. By the end of the novel, we've had to do some serious puzzle work, sure, but
we also are rewarded with a rich, multilayered story of a complicated protagonist and the ripple effect his
life creates on those around him.
 Choices
In Lord Jim, the book's namesake makes one whopper of a bad choice. It's a choice he just can't seem to
bounce back from and he spends the rest of the novel trying to understand it, justify it, escape it, and rise
above it. In one weak, fleeting moment aboard the Patna, Jim makes a snap decision that throws a big ol'
wrench into the rest of his life. The aftermath takes us through the rest of the novel, and reminds us that while
choices can be made in a matter of seconds, their consequences can last a lifetime
 Memory and the Past
In a sense, Lord Jim is all memories. Marlow tells Jim's story through his own memory, and the memory of
other sources (including Jim himself) from whom he learns about Jim's life and death. For many of these
characters, Jim in particular, the past and memories of that past are inescapable. Jim's fateful choice
aboard the Patna sticks with him for the rest of his life. Memories of it consume him, shaping his
choices and his chances. Marlow seems keen on telling us this story to show us just how powerful these
memories can be.
 Men and Masculinity
Women are few and far between in Lord Jim, which means we're reading a novel that's all about men being
men – sailing, pirating, and fighting (okay, the ladies get in on a little of that action, too). Being a man in
the British Empire was all about acting with a sense of duty and honor, and when Jim fails to do so, he runs
into all kinds of problems and loses the respect of just about everyone he knows. Yet there are hints
throughout the novel that Jim is not some sort of strange, unmanly anomaly. The more characters like Marlow
relate to Jim, the more that calls into question the standard ideas of masculinity at the time.
 Guilt and Blame
In Lord Jim, Jim's entire story, as told by Marlow, is all about coping with guilt, shame, remorse, and
regret. Jim feels guilty, sure, but we also come to understand how his guilt and shame affect his
community. Marlow often describes himself as ashamed or embarrassed on Jim's behalf. Brierly, Stein, and
others also express their horror over Jim's actions, which seem to have brought some sort of damning guilt
down on the entire seafaring community. For much of the novel, Jim tries to overcome his guilt and move on
with his life, and at the end, we're left to decide if he succeeds.
 Respect and Reputation
Lord Jim takes place in the late 19th century, and those Victorian Brits weren't exactly known for being chill
and flexible. When Jim disobeys the social code that governs his group of "gentlemen" sailors, he has to
be punished as a result. His most significant punishment comes in the form of a major blow to his
reputation, which he attempts to avoid and then rebuild over the course of the novel. The problem is,
when it comes to his reputation, Jim is his own worst enemy. By refusing to let the past go and move on, he
practically forces people into judging him unfavorably, and his inability to get over his mistake ensures
that his past will haunt him for the rest of his life.
 Principles
Lord Jim is chock full of sailors following a strict behavioral code that's all about being a gentleman. As a
seaman, Jim has to follow that code, too, but he chucks it overboard with his pride and himself when he
abandons ship on the Patna. The problem with Jim's "gentlemanly" behavioral code is that it isn't the clearest
thing in the world. Gentlemen are supposed to be honorable, dutiful, patriotic, heroic, and other vague,
impressive-sounding things, but it's hard to live up to those expectations when your life is on the line.
Jim actually retains all these qualities even after the Patna, but his one lapse on board defines him,
regardless of how he behaves on shore. Once he violates sailors' principles, there's no going back.
 Youth
Jim is the ne'er do well kid to Marlow's well meaning if a bit frustrated father-figure. Jim makes mistake after
youthful mistake, and Marlow picks up the pieces when he can. In many ways, we might think of Lord Jim as
the story of a young man struggling to overcome an impulsive mistake. Jim hasn't had a ton of life
experience, after all, and he might be ill-equipped to handle the challenges life throws his way. But can we
write off all Jim's troubles and bad decision making as a product of his immaturity? Or is there something
more deeply wrong with his character?
 Exile
After his Patna disgrace, Jim refuses to have contact with people he knew before, including his own family.
Though we feel sympathy for his unfortunate situation, Jim is the author of his own exile. This sends our
boy on a long search for a new place to call home, which you might say he finds on Patusan. Lord Jim traces
the great deal of lonely wandering before he manages to carve out a little corner of the world for himself.
Though he does manage to make a name for himself in Patusan, Jim's self-imposed exile is always in the
back of his and our minds.
Foreignness and the Other
The two major episodes of Lord Jim deal with different kinds of "others." Aboard the Patna we get lower-
class men contrasted with Jim, who is a middle-class gentleman. On Patusan, we get native islanders
contrasted to Jim, the white imperialist. What's interesting is how Conrad flips expectations around in both
episodes. Jim is never the one with all the power, even though his racial, economic, and national status would
seem to empower him. And unlike a lot of authors of the era, Conrad uses "others" to point out negatives
in the dominant group (white Englishmen) rather than write off all "others" as negative.

Lord Jim Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory

 Brierly's Pocketwatch

When Brierly commits suicide by jumping ship, he leaves his pocketwatch hanging on the rail. Let's take a
look at that scene:

'There's a funny thing. I don't like to touch it.' It was Captain Brierly's gold chronometer watch carefully hung
under the rail by its chain.

'As soon as my eyes fell on it something struck me, and I knew, sir. My legs got soft under me. It was as if I
had seen him go over; and I could tell how far behind he was left too.' (6.7-8)

We have to ask: if Captain Brierly was planning to commit suicide, why bother leaving his watch behind?
Here's a theory. Brierly is all about order, right? He has a strong sense of duty and honor, and he does
the right thing at the right time and expects everyone else to do the same. But Jim's actions aboard the
Patna have challenged that notion of order for him. The watch acts as a symbol of his old life, the one that
can no longer exist in a world full of Jims, where things are murky and muddled.

His leaving his watch behind parallels what the novel does with time in general. Conrad has left behind
the good old-fashioned business of writing things in chronological order. He jumps around in time with
wild abandon, leaving no room for orderly folks like Brierly to figure out what's going on.

Lord Jim's fuzzy relationship to time foreshadows the Modernists' view of time as something murky,
unclear, and relative. In Lord Jim, and in much of the modernist literature that follows it, time is
experienced differently by different people, and it slows down or speeds up depending on a character's
perception.

 Imagination

The fear grows shadowy; and Imagination, the enemy of men, the father of all terrors, unstimulated, sinks to
rest in the dullness of exhausted emotion. Jim saw nothing but the disorder of his tossed cabin. He lay there
battened down in the midst of a small devastation, and felt secretly glad he had not to go on deck. (2.3)

The enemy of men? Imagination? Surely you must be joking, Marlow. Nope. The guy is deadly serious:

His confounded imagination had evoked for him all the horrors of panic, the trampling rush, the pitiful
screams, boats swamped – all the appalling incidents of a disaster at sea he had ever heard of. (7.24)

From these two quotes, it's clear that Lord Jim is not talking about imagination of the Willy Wonka variety. In
this novel, imagination is something much more sinister. It is a source of fear.

Jim imagines all sorts of horrors when he is aboard the Patna, which leads him to jump overboard. He lets his
imagination run wild, and that is a very dangerous thing for a sailor.

But there is another side to the coin as well. While Jim shows us the dangers of an overactive imagination,
Brierly shows us the dangers of having no imagination at all:

"What's the use of it? It is the stupidest set out you can imagine," he pursued hotly. I remarked that there was
no option. He interrupted me with a sort of pent-up violence. "I feel like a fool all the time." (7.13)

Brierly wasn't able to conceive of anything like the Patna incident at all. It is simply beyond him. But when
he is faced with the facts and must acknowledge that scandals like the Patna incident can and do occur, he is
shocked into total despair.

 Butterflies

Stein collects butterflies, which may seem like just a passing hobby. But we think there just might be
something more to it. Let's take a look at Stein's description of his favorite pasttime:
"When I got up I shook like a leaf with excitement, and when I opened these beautiful wings and made sure
what a rare and so extraordinary perfect specimen I had, my head went round and my legs became so weak
with emotion that I had to sit on the ground. I had greatly desired to possess myself of a specimen of that
species [...]"

He sighed and turned again to the glass case. The frail and beautiful wings quivered faintly, as if his breath
had for an instant called back to life that gorgeous object of his dreams. (20.10-5)

Each time Stein captures a butterfly, he must kill it. He both admires and destroys these beautiful bugs,
because each time he gets his hands on one, he takes away its freedom, and the beauty of the insect in flight.
It's a bit of a contradiction, right? If you love butterflies so much, Stein, perhaps you should leave the poor
things alone.

But he can't. For Stein, all beauty is fleeting and all perfect moments must come to an end. His own
personal history seems to confirm this: his wife and daughter were tragically killed, and live on only in his
dreams and memories. He spends the aftermath of that tragedy tracking down and capturing butterflies,
perhaps in an effort to recapture what he has lost.

Aside from personal considerations, Stein's butterfly hunting is also a powerful symbol of the British
Empire (and other European empires). Stein goes tromping around foreign places, capturing these
things of beauty so he can study them and show off his trophies to his admirers. That sounds eerily
familiar when you consider that European imperialism was all about traveling to foreign places and
capturing their resources for European use. Perhaps these butterflies represent what is lost when
Europeans colonize these far-flung foreign lands.

 Water Imagery

We've got a novel about sailors in Lord Jim, which means that water and the sea are like characters in and of
themselves. Marlow spends a fair amount of time pondering the sea and its moods, personifying the sea like
any sailor worth his salt should. And the sea brings about Jim's defining moment aboard the Patna.

One of the earliest passages we get describing the sea makes it sound downright monstrous:

And under the sinister splendor of that sky the sea, blue and profound, remained still, without a stir, without a
ripple, without a wrinkle – viscous, stagnant, dead. (2.13)

Anything that "still" and "dead" just has to come back to life, right? And indeed the sea does, with a
vengeance. When the Patna starts to go down (or at least appears to), water becomes a deadly force to be
reckoned with, full of motion:

It was too dark just then for them to see each other, and, moreover, they were blinded and half drowned with
the rain. He told me it was like being swept by a flood through a cavern. [...] The sea hissed "like twenty
thousand kettles." (10.1)

Still, no matter how lethal the sea gets, we can't forget that water is also lifegiving in Lord Jim. As Jim freaks
out aboard the Patna, one of the passengers begs him for water (at this point unaware that the ship is in any
danger) reminding us that water is totally necessary for survival, even at sea, when sailors are surrounded by
it. And when Jim gets a job as a water-clerk, it's all about helping ships get the supplies they need to survive at
sea, including fresh drinking water. After all, sailors can't drink the sea; they can only sail atop it.

There are a lot of other instances of water and liquid being important in Lord Jim. Did you notice any? What
about when Jim knocks over his drink while talking to Marlow (10.14)? Or the river that divides Patusan.
What do you make of that?

 Darkness Imagery

It seems like half this novel takes place at night. The Patna sinks at night, Jim confesses his shameful actions
to Marlow under the cover of darkness, Marlow relates his story to an audience over the course of a night, and
a lot of Jim's exciting Patusan adventures occur after the sun goes down. So what's the deal with the darkness?

Of course it's more dangerous, exciting, and suspenseful than daytime. But more than that, it conceals
things. Things like secrets.

A huge chunk of Lord Jim deals with people sharing secrets, and having them do so in darkness
emphasizes the clandestine nature of their conversations. Some secrets are hard to fully discover, too,
which is yet another thing that darkness symbolizes in Lord Jim. Marlow frequently notes that Jim was
obscured from him, like the moment in Chapter 16, when he says, "He was not—if I may say so—clear to
me" (16.2). It makes sense that Marlow speaks of Jim at night, when it's hard to see clearly, and facial
expressions remain in shadows.

Heart of Darkness

full title ·  Heart of Darkness

author  · Joseph Conrad

type of work  · Novella (between a novel and a short story in length and scope)

genre  · Symbolism, colonial literature, adventure tale, frame story, almost a romance in its insistence on
heroism and the supernatural and its preference for the symbolic over the realistic

language  · English

time and place written  · England, 1898–1899; inspired by Conrad’s journey to the Congo in 1890

date of first publication  · Serialized in Blackwood’s magazine in 1899; published in 1902 in the volume
Youth: A Narrative; and Two Other Stories

publisher  · J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd.

narrator  · There are two narrators: an anonymous passenger on a pleasure ship, who listens to Marlow’s
story, and Marlow himself, a middle-aged ship’s captain.

point of view  · The first narrator speaks in the first-person plural, on behalf of four other passengers who
listen to Marlow’s tale. Marlow narrates his story in the first person, describing only what he witnessed and
experienced, and providing his own commentary on the story.

tone  · Ambivalent: Marlow is disgusted at the brutality of the Company and horrified by Kurtz’s
degeneration, but he claims that any thinking man would be tempted into similar behavior.

tense  · Past

setting (time)  · Latter part of the nineteenth century, probably sometime between 1876 and 1892

setting (place)  · Opens on the Thames River outside London, where Marlow is telling the story that makes
up Heart of Darkness. Events of the story take place in Brussels, at the Company’s offices, and in the Congo,
then a Belgian territory.

protagonist  · Marlow

major conflict  · Both Marlow and Kurtz confront a conflict between their images of themselves as
“civilized” Europeans and the temptation to abandon morality completely once they leave the context of
European society.

rising action  · The brutality Marlow witnesses in the Company’s employees, the rumors he hears that Kurtz
is a remarkable and humane man, and the numerous examples of Europeans breaking down mentally or
physically in the environment of Africa.

climax  · Marlow’s discovery, upon reaching the Inner Station, that Kurtz has completely abandoned
European morals and norms of behavior

falling action  · Marlow’s acceptance of responsibility for Kurtz’s legacy, Marlow’s encounters with
Company officials and Kurtz’s family and friends, Marlow’s visit to Kurtz’s Intended

themes  · The hypocrisy of imperialism, madness as a result of imperialism, the absurdity of evil

motifs  · Darkness (very seldom opposed by light), interiors vs. surfaces (kernel/shell, coast/inland,
station/forest, etc.), ironic understatement, hyperbolic language, inability to find words to describe situation
adequately, images of ridiculous waste, upriver versus downriver/toward and away from Kurtz/away from and
back toward civilization (quest or journey structure)

symbols  · Rivers, fog, women (Kurtz’s Intended, his African mistress), French warship shelling forested
coast, grove of death, severed heads on fence posts, Kurtz’s “Report,” dead helmsman, maps, “whited
sepulchre” of Brussels, knitting women in Company offices, man trying to fill bucket with hole in it
foreshadowing  · Permeates every moment of the narrative—mostly operates on the level of imagery, which
is consistently dark, gloomy, and threatening

Joseph Conrad did not begin to learn English until he was twenty-one years old. He was born Jozef Teodor
Konrad Korzeniowski on December 3, 1857, in the Polish Ukraine. When Conrad was quite young, his father
was exiled to Siberia on suspicion of plotting against the Russian government. After the death of the boy’s
mother, Conrad’s father sent him to his mother’s brother in Kraków to be educated, and Conrad never again
saw his father. He traveled to Marseilles when he was seventeen and spent the next twenty years as a sailor.
He signed on to an English ship in 1878, and eight years later he became a British subject. In 1889, he began
his first novel, Almayer’s Folly, and began actively searching for a way to fulfill his boyhood dream of
traveling to the Congo. He took command of a steamship in the Belgian Congo in 1890, and his experiences
in the Congo came to provide the outline for Heart of Darkness. Conrad’s time in Africa wreaked havoc on
his health, however, and he returned to England to recover. He returned to sea twice before finishing
Almayer’s Folly in 1894 and wrote several other books, including one about Marlow called Youth: A
Narrative before beginning Heart of Darkness in 1898. He wrote most of his other major works—including
Lord Jim, which also features Marlow; Nostromo; and The Secret Agent, as well as several collaborations
with Ford Maddox Ford—during the following two decades. Conrad died in 1924.

Conrad’s works, Heart of Darkness in particular, provide a bridge between Victorian values and the ideals
of modernism. Like their Victorian predecessors, these novels rely on traditional ideas of heroism,
which are nevertheless under constant attack in a changing world and in places far from England.
Women occupy traditional roles as arbiters of domesticity and morality, yet they are almost never
present in the narrative; instead, the concepts of “home” and “civilization” exist merely as hypocritical
ideals, meaningless to men for whom survival is in constant doubt. While the threats that Conrad’s
characters face are concrete ones—illness, violence, conspiracy—they nevertheless acquire a philosophical
character. Like much of the best modernist literature produced in the early decades of the twentieth century,
Heart of Darkness is as much about alienation, confusion, and profound doubt as it is about imperialism.

Imperialism is nevertheless at the center of Heart of Darkness. By the 1890s, most of the world’s “dark
places” had been placed at least nominally under European control, and the major European powers were
stretched thin, trying to administer and protect massive, far-flung empires. Cracks were beginning to appear in
the system: riots, wars, and the wholesale abandonment of commercial enterprises all threatened the white
men living in the distant corners of empires. Things were clearly falling apart. Heart of Darkness suggests
that this is the natural result when men are allowed to operate outside a social system of checks and
balances: power, especially power over other human beings, inevitably corrupts. At the same time, this
begs the question of whether it is possible to call an individual insane or wrong when he is part of a system
that is so thoroughly corrupted and corrupting. Heart of Darkness, thus, at its most abstract level, is a
narrative about the difficulty of understanding the world beyond the self, about the ability of one man
to judge another.

Although Heart of Darkness was one of the first literary texts to provide a critical view of European
imperial activities, it was initially read by critics as anything but controversial. While the book was generally
admired, it was typically read either as a condemnation of a certain type of adventurer who could easily take
advantage of imperialism’s opportunities, or else as a sentimental novel reinforcing domestic values: Kurtz’s
Intended, who appears at the novella’s conclusion, was roundly praised by turn-of-the-century reviewers for
her maturity and sentimental appeal. Conrad’s decision to set the book in a Belgian colony and to have
Marlow work for a Belgian trading concern made it even easier for British readers to avoid seeing themselves
reflected in Heart of Darkness. Although these early reactions seem ludicrous to a modern reader, they
reinforce the novella’s central themes of hypocrisy and absurdity.

Plot Overview

Heart of Darkness centers around Marlow, an introspective sailor, and his journey up the Congo River to meet
Kurtz, reputed to be an idealistic man of great abilities. Marlow takes a job as a riverboat captain with the
Company, a Belgian concern organized to trade in the Congo. As he travels to Africa and then up the Congo,
Marlow encounters widespread inefficiency and brutality in the Company’s stations. The native inhabitants of
the region have been forced into the Company’s service, and they suffer terribly from overwork and ill
treatment at the hands of the Company’s agents. The cruelty and squalor of imperial enterprise contrasts
sharply with the impassive and majestic jungle that surrounds the white man’s settlements, making them
appear to be tiny islands amidst a vast darkness.

Marlow arrives at the Central Station, run by the general manager, an unwholesome, conspiratorial character.
He finds that his steamship has been sunk and spends several months waiting for parts to repair it. His interest
in Kurtz grows during this period. The manager and his favorite, the brickmaker, seem to fear Kurtz as a
threat to their position. Kurtz is rumored to be ill, making the delays in repairing the ship all the more costly.
Marlow eventually gets the parts he needs to repair his ship, and he and the manager set out with a few agents
(whom Marlow calls pilgrims because of their strange habit of carrying long, wooden staves wherever they
go) and a crew of cannibals on a long, difficult voyage up the river. The dense jungle and the oppressive
silence make everyone aboard a little jumpy, and the occasional glimpse of a native village or the sound of
drums works the pilgrims into a frenzy.

Marlow and his crew come across a hut with stacked firewood, together with a note saying that the wood is
for them but that they should approach cautiously. Shortly after the steamer has taken on the firewood, it is
surrounded by a dense fog. When the fog clears, the ship is attacked by an unseen band of natives, who fire
arrows from the safety of the forest. The African helmsman is killed before Marlow frightens the natives away
with the ship’s steam whistle. Not long after, Marlow and his companions arrive at Kurtz’s Inner Station,
expecting to find him dead, but a half-crazed Russian trader, who meets them as they come ashore, assures
them that everything is fine and informs them that he is the one who left the wood. The Russian claims that
Kurtz has enlarged his mind and cannot be subjected to the same moral judgments as normal people.
Apparently, Kurtz has established himself as a god with the natives and has gone on brutal raids in the
surrounding territory in search of ivory. The collection of severed heads adorning the fence posts around the
station attests to his “methods.” The pilgrims bring Kurtz out of the station-house on a stretcher, and a large
group of native warriors pours out of the forest and surrounds them. Kurtz speaks to them, and the natives
disappear into the woods.

The manager brings Kurtz, who is quite ill, aboard the steamer. A beautiful native woman, apparently Kurtz’s
mistress, appears on the shore and stares out at the ship. The Russian implies that she is somehow involved
with Kurtz and has caused trouble before through her influence over him. The Russian reveals to Marlow,
after swearing him to secrecy, that Kurtz had ordered the attack on the steamer to make them believe he was
dead in order that they might turn back and leave him to his plans. The Russian then leaves by canoe, fearing
the displeasure of the manager. Kurtz disappears in the night, and Marlow goes out in search of him, finding
him crawling on all fours toward the native camp. Marlow stops him and convinces him to return to the ship.
They set off down the river the next morning, but Kurtz’s health is failing fast.

Marlow listens to Kurtz talk while he pilots the ship, and Kurtz entrusts Marlow with a packet of personal
documents, including an eloquent pamphlet on civilizing the savages which ends with a scrawled message
that says, “Exterminate all the brutes!” The steamer breaks down, and they have to stop for repairs. Kurtz
dies, uttering his last words—“The horror! The horror!”—in the presence of the confused Marlow. Marlow
falls ill soon after and barely survives. Eventually he returns to Europe and goes to see Kurtz’s Intended (his
fiancée). She is still in mourning, even though it has been over a year since Kurtz’s death, and she praises him
as a paragon of virtue and achievement. She asks what his last words were, but Marlow cannot bring himself
to shatter her illusions with the truth. Instead, he tells her that Kurtz’s last word was her name.

Themes

The Hypocrisy of Imperialism

Heart of Darkness explores the issues surrounding imperialism in complicated ways. As Marlow travels from
the Outer Station to the Central Station and finally up the river to the Inner Station, he encounters scenes of
torture, cruelty, and near-slavery. At the very least, the incidental scenery of the book offers a harsh picture of
colonial enterprise. The impetus behind Marlow’s adventures, too, has to do with the hypocrisy inherent in the
rhetoric used to justify imperialism. The men who work for the Company describe what they do as “trade,”
and their treatment of native Africans is part of a benevolent project of “civilization.” Kurtz, on the other
hand, is open about the fact that he does not trade but rather takes ivory by force, and he describes his own
treatment of the natives with the words “suppression” and “extermination”: he does not hide the fact that he
rules through violence and intimidation. His perverse honesty leads to his downfall, as his success threatens to
expose the evil practices behind European activity in Africa.

However, for Marlow as much as for Kurtz or for the Company, Africans in this book are mostly objects:
Marlow refers to his helmsman as a piece of machinery, and Kurtz’s African mistress is at best a piece of
statuary. It can be argued that Heart of Darkness participates in an oppression of nonwhites that is much more
sinister and much harder to remedy than the open abuses of Kurtz or the Company’s men. Africans become
for Marlow a mere backdrop, a human screen against which he can play out his philosophical and existential
struggles. Their existence and their exoticism enable his self-contemplation. This kind of dehumanization is
harder to identify than colonial violence or open racism. While Heart of Darkness offers a powerful
condemnation of the hypocritical operations of imperialism, it also presents a set of issues surrounding
race that is ultimately troubling.

Madness as a Result of Imperialism

Madness is closely linked to imperialism in this book. Africa is responsible for mental disintegration as
well as physical illness. Madness has two primary functions. First, it serves as an ironic device to engage
the reader’s sympathies. Kurtz, Marlow is told from the beginning, is mad. However, as Marlow, and the
reader, begin to form a more complete picture of Kurtz, it becomes apparent that his madness is only relative,
that in the context of the Company insanity is difficult to define. Thus, both Marlow and the reader begin to
sympathize with Kurtz and view the Company with suspicion. Madness also functions to establish the
necessity of social fictions. Although social mores and explanatory justifications are shown throughout
Heart of Darkness to be utterly false and even leading to evil, they are nevertheless necessary for both
group harmony and individual security. Madness, in Heart of Darkness, is the result of being removed
from one’s social context and allowed to be the sole arbiter of one’s own actions. Madness is thus linked not
only to absolute power and a kind of moral genius but to man’s fundamental fallibility: Kurtz has no
authority to whom he answers but himself, and this is more than any one man can bear.

The Absurdity of Evil

This novella is, above all, an exploration of hypocrisy, ambiguity, and moral confusion. It explodes the
idea of the proverbial choice between the lesser of two evils. As the idealistic Marlow is forced to align
himself with either the hypocritical and malicious colonial bureaucracy or the openly malevolent, rule-
defying Kurtz, it becomes increasingly clear that to try to judge either alternative is an act of folly: how
can moral standards or social values be relevant in judging evil? Is there such thing as insanity in a
world that has already gone insane? The number of ridiculous situations Marlow witnesses act as
reflections of the larger issue: at one station, for instance, he sees a man trying to carry water in a bucket with
a large hole in it. At the Outer Station, he watches native laborers blast away at a hillside with no particular
goal in mind. The absurd involves both insignificant silliness and life-or-death issues, often simultaneously.
That the serious and the mundane are treated similarly suggests a profound moral confusion and a
tremendous hypocrisy: it is terrifying that Kurtz’s homicidal megalomania and a leaky bucket provoke
essentially the same reaction from Marlow.

Motifs

Observation and Eavesdropping

Marlow gains a great deal of information by watching the world around him and by overhearing others’
conversations, as when he listens from the deck of the wrecked steamer to the manager of the Central Station
and his uncle discussing Kurtz and the Russian trader. This phenomenon speaks to the impossibility of
direct communication between individuals: information must come as the result of chance observation
and astute interpretation. Words themselves fail to capture meaning adequately, and thus they must be
taken in the context of their utterance. Another good example of this is Marlow’s conversation with the
brickmaker, during which Marlow is able to figure out a good deal more than simply what the man has to say.

Interiors and Exteriors

Comparisons between interiors and exteriors pervade Heart of Darkness. As the narrator states at the
beginning of the text, Marlow is more interested in surfaces, in the surrounding aura of a thing rather than in
any hidden nugget of meaning deep within the thing itself. This inverts the usual hierarchy of meaning:
normally one seeks the deep message or hidden truth. The priority placed on observation demonstrates
that penetrating to the interior of an idea or a person is impossible in this world. Thus, Marlow is
confronted with a series of exteriors and surfaces—the river’s banks, the forest walls around the station,
Kurtz’s broad forehead—that he must interpret. These exteriors are all the material he is given, and they
provide him with perhaps a more profound source of knowledge than any falsely constructed interior
“kernel.”

Darkness
Darkness is important enough conceptually to be part of the book’s title. However, it is difficult to discern
exactly what it might mean, given that absolutely everything in the book is cloaked in darkness. Africa,
England, and Brussels are all described as gloomy and somehow dark, even if the sun is shining brightly.
Darkness thus seems to operate metaphorically and existentially rather than specifically. Darkness is
the inability to see: this may sound simple, but as a description of the human condition it has profound
implications. Failing to see another human being means failing to understand that individual and
failing to establish any sort of sympathetic communion with him or her.

Symbols

Fog

Fog is a sort of corollary to darkness. Fog not only obscures but distorts: it gives one just enough
information to begin making decisions but no way to judge the accuracy of that information, which
often ends up being wrong. Marlow’s steamer is caught in the fog, meaning that he has no idea where he’s
going and no idea whether peril or open water lies ahead.

The “Whited Sepulchre”

The “whited sepulchre” is probably Brussels, where the Company’s headquarters are located. A sepulchre
implies death and confinement, and indeed Europe is the origin of the colonial enterprises that bring
death to white men and to their colonial subjects; it is also governed by a set of reified social principles
that both enable cruelty, dehumanization, and evil and prohibit change. The phrase “whited sepulchre” comes
from the biblical Book of Matthew. In the passage, Matthew describes “whited sepulchres” as something
beautiful on the outside but containing horrors within (the bodies of the dead); thus, the image is
appropriate for Brussels, given the hypocritical Belgian rhetoric about imperialism’s civilizing mission.
(Belgian colonies, particularly the Congo, were notorious for the violence perpetuated against the
natives.)

Women

Both Kurtz’s Intended and his African mistress function as blank slates upon which the values and the
wealth of their respective societies can be displayed. Marlow frequently claims that women are the keepers
of naïve illusions; although this sounds condemnatory, such a role is in fact crucial, as these naïve illusions
are at the root of the social fictions that justify economic enterprise and colonial expansion. In return, the
women are the beneficiaries of much of the resulting wealth, and they become objects upon which men
can display their own success and status.

The River

The Congo River is the key to Africa for Europeans. It allows them access to the center of the continent
without having to physically cross it; in other words, it allows the white man to remain always separate
or outside. Africa is thus reduced to a series of two-dimensional scenes that flash by Marlow’s steamer as he
travels upriver. The river also seems to want to expel Europeans from Africa altogether: its current
makes travel upriver slow and difficult, but the flow of water makes travel downriver, back toward
“civilization,” rapid and seemingly inevitable. Marlow’s struggles with the river as he travels upstream
toward Kurtz reflect his struggles to understand the situation in which he has found himself. The ease
with which he journeys back downstream, on the other hand, mirrors his acquiescence to Kurtz and his
“choice of nightmares.”