NARRATIVE STRATEGY AND IMPERIALISM IN CONRAD'S "LORD JIM"
"Indeed this affair, I may notice in passing, had an extraordinary power of defying the shortness of memories and the length of time: it seemed to live, with a sort of uncanny vitality, in the minds of men, on the tips of their tongues."1 So says Marlow, the main narrator in Lord Jim, of the abandonment of 800 Muslim pilgrims on the frigate, the Patna, by a white crew. The Patna affair provides the initial occasion of Marlow's interest in Jim, first mate on the frigate. The episode reflects the tension between white and non white in a world already carved out between various European nations. Yet, rather surprisingly, Marlow seems not to understand the hold of this event on the minds of people who are not seamen. Marlow's apparent incomprehension here is curious because the tale Marlow tells his listeners in Lord Jim is at least peripherally concerned with the relationship between colonizer and colonized. At various times, in fact, Jim's story provides the impetus for addressing the role of the white man in a colonial milieu. Yet rather than addressing the issues of race that underlie the Patna fiasco, Marlow's tale draws into question the relationship between duty and character. The event on the Patna leads to an analysis of the disjunction between an individual's heroic sense of himself and his private capacity.2 Although the origin of Marlow's interest in Jim is the racially charged episode aboard the Patna, his narrative quickly becomes concerned with "larger" issues of epistemological and metaphysical doubt. The shift of interest I describe here is representative of Marlow's narrative throughout Lord Jim: his chief concern is with "the state of a man's soul" (p. 43) rather than with the material conditions created by imperialism that determine the contours of Jim's life. For Marlow, the contradictions of the colonial situation only provide the backdrop for the narrative's interest in the modernist condition of fragmentation and isolation. By analysing three key moments of the narrative structure?first, the entry of Marlow into the narrative; second, the moment when his spoken narrative yields to his written one; and third, the shift to romance and adventure in the Patusan section?I argue that the narrative of Lord Jim relies on the discursive field of imperialism to explore the figure of Jim.3