feat_summary_path: finished_summaries/gradesaver/Lord Jim/section_0_part_0.txt
feat_book_id: Lord Jim.chapters 1-3
feat_summary_id: chapters 1-3
feat_summary: {"name": "Chapters 1-3", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210422054542/https://www.gradesaver.com/lord-jim/study-guide/summary-chapters-1-3", "summary": "Lord Jim begins with the powerful physical description of a man \"an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built.\" He has a deep voice and immaculate dress, being white \"from shoes to hat,\" and he makes his living as a water-clerk in \"various Eastern ports.\" He is \"very popular.\" This image is layered with attributes that arise in a consideration of what is required to be a water-clerk of quality. Thus the reader learns that the man has \"Ability in the abstract\" and that he is able to apply it \"practically.\" The man is called \"Jim.\" Jim comes to be known as \"Tuan Jim\" or \"Lord Jim\" among the Malays of the jungle village where he lives \"incognito.\" Answering just how he becomes \"Lord Jim\" and just why he is \"incognito\" is the project of the tale. Jim is rootless, moving farther and farther east, escaping whatever fact of his history that seems to be following him. Born the son of a parson, he is answering the call of the sea. He is smart, physically fit, and a dreamer of danger and success. The reader, however, now learns of a collision at sea where Jim leapt to his feet but was beaten. \"Too late, youngster,\" the captain of the ship tells him, as the glory of the rescue falls like a wreath over the bowman, who jumped first, \"a boy with a face like a girl's and big grey eyes.\" Jim is angry and frustrated with his missed opportunity to be a hero. Two years of training and life on the sea pass, and Jim feels let down by the humdrum nature of his experiences. The sea, he feels, is not so full of the adventures he once imagined. Jim is \"chief mate of a fine ship, without ever having been tested\" . He spends some time on his back because of an injury and is left at a hospital in an \"Eastern port.\" When able, Jim descends into the nearby port town and studies the nature of men and life around him, all sharing the same calling of the sea. In time, he discards the idea of returning to England and chooses, instead, to become chief mate of the Patna, an old local steamer, manned by a vastly overweight New South Wales German captain. The steamer is headed for Mecca with eight hundred pilgrims led by an Arab leader in white, who offers a prayer. There are only five white men on board. At night, as Jim contemplates the Arabian Sea from the bridge of the steamer, the speed steady, and the human landscape of passengers asleep, fathers and sons, beneath him, he considers his romantic dreams--\"the success of his imaginary achievements\" . The German captain appears with too little clothing; the second engineer complains. A conversation takes place regarding drink and being drunk, and then fear and courage, but \"those men did not belong to the world of heroic adventure\" . Suddenly, the three of them are lurched by the force of a disturbance beneath the boat. The sound is like the \"faint noise of thunder ... hardly more than a vibration\" .", "analysis": "Lord Jim begins with a direct, close-up view of its subject: Jim.  His physical description is at first powerfully impressed upon the reader, and then the reader encounters the mysterious manner in which he drifts through the world.  He is a clean-cut, well-liked young man, but the mystery is that he is constantly trying to outrun or escape a fact of his past.  The reader is brought into a state of curiosity.  Who is this young man?  Why is he trying to maintain himself incognito?  Why is he a water-clerk, when he appears to be gifted with intelligence and talent?  And, most importantly, what is the fact from which he is so energetically trying to escape? The reference to Jim as having \"Ability in the abstract\" is crucial to the construction of his character in the novel.  He is gifted with a kind of genius, but it only exists in an abstract way.  The effort is then to realize this \"ability\" in the real world, to take action, to create change, and to realize the potential of such an \"ability.\"  It is further important to note that Jim is never given a surname throughout the narrative.  In this way, the lone \"Jim\" strikes the reader as intimately present yet anonymous, illustrating precisely the kind of ambiguity for which Conrad is famous. When the reader is then told that Jim becomes \"Tuan Jim\" or \"Lord Jim,\" Conrad drives the dramatic motion of the novel by causing curiosity regarding how Jim will attain this title. The view in the narrative then cuts to a significant moment in his personal history, the occasion when he was too late in seizing the opportunity to rescue a person at sea.  Angry with the lost opportunity, Jim expresses his romantic temperament; this part of the tale also allows us to see his motivations for pursuing a life at sea in the first place.  He is a dreamer, and he seems to be confident of some aspect of his self as being more than capable of achieving his dreams.  This dreaming quality is characteristic of much of the driving force for young men to pursue a life at sea, and in this way Jim becomes a quintessential example of youthful aspiration.  A question is then immediately suggested: how will Jim mature?  How will he move from being a dreaming young man to the man running from his past and then a man with the title \"Lord Jim\"? One night, Jim observes his fellow crew members, thinking that they are not part of the world of \"heroic adventure.\"  Thus Jim differentiates himself: \"he shared the air they breathed, but he was different\" .  Now, as the sudden and strange vibration occurs beneath the ship, the situation leads us to ask: will Jim be able to prove his difference?"}
text: He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he
  advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head
  forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging
  bull. His voice was deep, loud, and his manner displayed a kind of
  dogged self-assertion which had nothing aggressive in it. It seemed
  a necessity, and it was directed apparently as much at himself as at
  anybody else. He was spotlessly neat, apparelled in immaculate white
  from shoes to hat, and in the various Eastern ports where he got his
  living as ship-chandler's water-clerk he was very popular.
  
  A water-clerk need not pass an examination in anything under the sun,
  but he must have Ability in the abstract and demonstrate it practically.
  His work consists in racing under sail, steam, or oars against other
  water-clerks for any ship about to anchor, greeting her captain
  cheerily, forcing upon him a card--the business card of the
  ship-chandler--and on his first visit on shore piloting him firmly but
  without ostentation to a vast, cavern-like shop which is full of things
  that are eaten and drunk on board ship; where you can get everything
  to make her seaworthy and beautiful, from a set of chain-hooks for her
  cable to a book of gold-leaf for the carvings of her stern; and where
  her commander is received like a brother by a ship-chandler he has never
  seen before. There is a cool parlour, easy-chairs, bottles, cigars,
  writing implements, a copy of harbour regulations, and a warmth of
  welcome that melts the salt of a three months' passage out of a seaman's
  heart. The connection thus begun is kept up, as long as the ship remains
  in harbour, by the daily visits of the water-clerk. To the captain he
  is faithful like a friend and attentive like a son, with the patience
  of Job, the unselfish devotion of a woman, and the jollity of a boon
  companion. Later on the bill is sent in. It is a beautiful and humane
  occupation. Therefore good water-clerks are scarce. When a water-clerk
  who possesses Ability in the abstract has also the advantage of having
  been brought up to the sea, he is worth to his employer a lot of money
  and some humouring. Jim had always good wages and as much humouring
  as would have bought the fidelity of a fiend. Nevertheless, with black
  ingratitude he would throw up the job suddenly and depart. To his
  employers the reasons he gave were obviously inadequate. They said
  'Confounded fool!' as soon as his back was turned. This was their
  criticism on his exquisite sensibility.
  
  To the white men in the waterside business and to the captains of ships
  he was just Jim--nothing more. He had, of course, another name, but he
  was anxious that it should not be pronounced. His incognito, which had
  as many holes as a sieve, was not meant to hide a personality but a
  fact. When the fact broke through the incognito he would leave
  suddenly the seaport where he happened to be at the time and go to
  another--generally farther east. He kept to seaports because he was a
  seaman in exile from the sea, and had Ability in the abstract, which is
  good for no other work but that of a water-clerk. He retreated in good
  order towards the rising sun, and the fact followed him casually but
  inevitably. Thus in the course of years he was known successively in
  Bombay, in Calcutta, in Rangoon, in Penang, in Batavia--and in each of
  these halting-places was just Jim the water-clerk. Afterwards, when his
  keen perception of the Intolerable drove him away for good from seaports
  and white men, even into the virgin forest, the Malays of the jungle
  village, where he had elected to conceal his deplorable faculty, added a
  word to the monosyllable of his incognito. They called him Tuan Jim: as
  one might say--Lord Jim.
  
  Originally he came from a parsonage. Many commanders of fine
  merchant-ships come from these abodes of piety and peace. Jim's father
  possessed such certain knowledge of the Unknowable as made for the
  righteousness of people in cottages without disturbing the ease of mind
  of those whom an unerring Providence enables to live in mansions. The
  little church on a hill had the mossy greyness of a rock seen through a
  ragged screen of leaves. It had stood there for centuries, but the trees
  around probably remembered the laying of the first stone. Below, the
  red front of the rectory gleamed with a warm tint in the midst of
  grass-plots, flower-beds, and fir-trees, with an orchard at the back,
  a paved stable-yard to the left, and the sloping glass of greenhouses
  tacked along a wall of bricks. The living had belonged to the family for
  generations; but Jim was one of five sons, and when after a course of
  light holiday literature his vocation for the sea had declared itself,
  he was sent at once to a 'training-ship for officers of the mercantile
  marine.'
  
  He learned there a little trigonometry and how to cross top-gallant
  yards. He was generally liked. He had the third place in navigation
  and pulled stroke in the first cutter. Having a steady head with an
  excellent physique, he was very smart aloft. His station was in the
  fore-top, and often from there he looked down, with the contempt of a
  man destined to shine in the midst of dangers, at the peaceful multitude
  of roofs cut in two by the brown tide of the stream, while scattered
  on the outskirts of the surrounding plain the factory chimneys rose
  perpendicular against a grimy sky, each slender like a pencil, and
  belching out smoke like a volcano. He could see the big ships departing,
  the broad-beamed ferries constantly on the move, the little boats
  floating far below his feet, with the hazy splendour of the sea in the
  distance, and the hope of a stirring life in the world of adventure.
  
  On the lower deck in the babel of two hundred voices he would forget
  himself, and beforehand live in his mind the sea-life of light
  literature. He saw himself saving people from sinking ships, cutting
  away masts in a hurricane, swimming through a surf with a line; or as a
  lonely castaway, barefooted and half naked, walking on uncovered reefs
  in search of shellfish to stave off starvation. He confronted savages on
  tropical shores, quelled mutinies on the high seas, and in a small boat
  upon the ocean kept up the hearts of despairing men--always an example
  of devotion to duty, and as unflinching as a hero in a book.
  
  'Something's up. Come along.'
  
  He leaped to his feet. The boys were streaming up the ladders. Above
  could be heard a great scurrying about and shouting, and when he got
  through the hatchway he stood still--as if confounded.
  
  It was the dusk of a winter's day. The gale had freshened since noon,
  stopping the traffic on the river, and now blew with the strength of a
  hurricane in fitful bursts that boomed like salvoes of great guns firing
  over the ocean. The rain slanted in sheets that flicked and subsided,
  and between whiles Jim had threatening glimpses of the tumbling tide,
  the small craft jumbled and tossing along the shore, the motionless
  buildings in the driving mist, the broad ferry-boats pitching
  ponderously at anchor, the vast landing-stages heaving up and down and
  smothered in sprays. The next gust seemed to blow all this away. The
  air was full of flying water. There was a fierce purpose in the gale, a
  furious earnestness in the screech of the wind, in the brutal tumult of
  earth and sky, that seemed directed at him, and made him hold his breath
  in awe. He stood still. It seemed to him he was whirled around.
  
  He was jostled. 'Man the cutter!' Boys rushed past him. A coaster
  running in for shelter had crashed through a schooner at anchor, and one
  of the ship's instructors had seen the accident. A mob of boys clambered
  on the rails, clustered round the davits. 'Collision. Just ahead of us.
  Mr. Symons saw it.' A push made him stagger against the mizzen-mast, and
  he caught hold of a rope. The old training-ship chained to her moorings
  quivered all over, bowing gently head to wind, and with her scanty
  rigging humming in a deep bass the breathless song of her youth at sea.
  'Lower away!' He saw the boat, manned, drop swiftly below the rail,
  and rushed after her. He heard a splash. 'Let go; clear the falls!' He
  leaned over. The river alongside seethed in frothy streaks. The cutter
  could be seen in the falling darkness under the spell of tide and wind,
  that for a moment held her bound, and tossing abreast of the ship.
  A yelling voice in her reached him faintly: 'Keep stroke, you young
  whelps, if you want to save anybody! Keep stroke!' And suddenly she
  lifted high her bow, and, leaping with raised oars over a wave, broke
  the spell cast upon her by the wind and tide.
  
  Jim felt his shoulder gripped firmly. 'Too late, youngster.' The captain
  of the ship laid a restraining hand on that boy, who seemed on the
  point of leaping overboard, and Jim looked up with the pain of conscious
  defeat in his eyes. The captain smiled sympathetically. 'Better luck
  next time. This will teach you to be smart.'
  
  A shrill cheer greeted the cutter. She came dancing back half full of
  water, and with two exhausted men washing about on her bottom boards.
  The tumult and the menace of wind and sea now appeared very contemptible
  to Jim, increasing the regret of his awe at their inefficient menace.
  Now he knew what to think of it. It seemed to him he cared nothing for
  the gale. He could affront greater perils. He would do so--better than
  anybody. Not a particle of fear was left. Nevertheless he brooded apart
  that evening while the bowman of the cutter--a boy with a face like
  a girl's and big grey eyes--was the hero of the lower deck. Eager
  questioners crowded round him. He narrated: 'I just saw his head
  bobbing, and I dashed my boat-hook in the water. It caught in his
  breeches and I nearly went overboard, as I thought I would, only old
  Symons let go the tiller and grabbed my legs--the boat nearly swamped.
  Old Symons is a fine old chap. I don't mind a bit him being grumpy with
  us. He swore at me all the time he held my leg, but that was only his
  way of telling me to stick to the boat-hook. Old Symons is awfully
  excitable--isn't he? No--not the little fair chap--the other, the big
  one with a beard. When we pulled him in he groaned, "Oh, my leg! oh,
  my leg!" and turned up his eyes. Fancy such a big chap fainting like
  a girl. Would any of you fellows faint for a jab with a boat-hook?--I
  wouldn't. It went into his leg so far.' He showed the boat-hook, which
  he had carried below for the purpose, and produced a sensation. 'No,
  silly! It was not his flesh that held him--his breeches did. Lots of
  blood, of course.'
  
  Jim thought it a pitiful display of vanity. The gale had ministered to
  a heroism as spurious as its own pretence of terror. He felt angry with
  the brutal tumult of earth and sky for taking him unawares and checking
  unfairly a generous readiness for narrow escapes. Otherwise he was
  rather glad he had not gone into the cutter, since a lower achievement
  had served the turn. He had enlarged his knowledge more than those who
  had done the work. When all men flinched, then--he felt sure--he alone
  would know how to deal with the spurious menace of wind and seas. He
  knew what to think of it. Seen dispassionately, it seemed contemptible.
  He could detect no trace of emotion in himself, and the final effect of
  a staggering event was that, unnoticed and apart from the noisy crowd of
  boys, he exulted with fresh certitude in his avidity for adventure, and
  in a sense of many-sided courage.
  After two years of training he went to sea, and entering the regions so
  well known to his imagination, found them strangely barren of adventure.
  He made many voyages. He knew the magic monotony of existence between
  sky and water: he had to bear the criticism of men, the exactions of the
  sea, and the prosaic severity of the daily task that gives bread--but
  whose only reward is in the perfect love of the work. This reward eluded
  him. Yet he could not go back, because there is nothing more enticing,
  disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea. Besides, his
  prospects were good. He was gentlemanly, steady, tractable, with a
  thorough knowledge of his duties; and in time, when yet very young, he
  became chief mate of a fine ship, without ever having been tested by
  those events of the sea that show in the light of day the inner worth of
  a man, the edge of his temper, and the fibre of his stuff; that reveal
  the quality of his resistance and the secret truth of his pretences, not
  only to others but also to himself.
  
  Only once in all that time he had again a glimpse of the earnestness in
  the anger of the sea. That truth is not so often made apparent as people
  might think. There are many shades in the danger of adventures and
  gales, and it is only now and then that there appears on the face of
  facts a sinister violence of intention--that indefinable something which
  forces it upon the mind and the heart of a man, that this complication
  of accidents or these elemental furies are coming at him with a purpose
  of malice, with a strength beyond control, with an unbridled cruelty
  that means to tear out of him his hope and his fear, the pain of his
  fatigue and his longing for rest: which means to smash, to destroy, to
  annihilate all he has seen, known, loved, enjoyed, or hated; all that is
  priceless and necessary--the sunshine, the memories, the future; which
  means to sweep the whole precious world utterly away from his sight by
  the simple and appalling act of taking his life.
  
  Jim, disabled by a falling spar at the beginning of a week of which his
  Scottish captain used to say afterwards, 'Man! it's a pairfect meeracle
  to me how she lived through it!' spent many days stretched on his back,
  dazed, battered, hopeless, and tormented as if at the bottom of an
  abyss of unrest. He did not care what the end would be, and in his lucid
  moments overvalued his indifference. The danger, when not seen, has
  the imperfect vagueness of human thought. 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. But now and again an uncontrollable rush of anguish would grip
  him bodily, make him gasp and writhe under the blankets, and then the
  unintelligent brutality of an existence liable to the agony of such
  sensations filled him with a despairing desire to escape at any cost.
  Then fine weather returned, and he thought no more about It.
  
  His lameness, however, persisted, and when the ship arrived at an
  Eastern port he had to go to the hospital. His recovery was slow, and he
  was left behind.
  
  There were only two other patients in the white men's ward: the purser
  of a gunboat, who had broken his leg falling down a hatchway; and a kind
  of railway contractor from a neighbouring province, afflicted by
  some mysterious tropical disease, who held the doctor for an ass, and
  indulged in secret debaucheries of patent medicine which his Tamil
  servant used to smuggle in with unwearied devotion. They told each other
  the story of their lives, played cards a little, or, yawning and in
  pyjamas, lounged through the day in easy-chairs without saying a word.
  The hospital stood on a hill, and a gentle breeze entering through the
  windows, always flung wide open, brought into the bare room the softness
  of the sky, the languor of the earth, the bewitching breath of the
  Eastern waters. There were perfumes in it, suggestions of infinite
  repose, the gift of endless dreams. Jim looked every day over the
  thickets of gardens, beyond the roofs of the town, over the fronds of
  palms growing on the shore, at that roadstead which is a thoroughfare
  to the East,--at the roadstead dotted by garlanded islets, lighted by
  festal sunshine, its ships like toys, its brilliant activity resembling
  a holiday pageant, with the eternal serenity of the Eastern sky overhead
  and the smiling peace of the Eastern seas possessing the space as far as
  the horizon.
  
  Directly he could walk without a stick, he descended into the town to
  look for some opportunity to get home. Nothing offered just then, and,
  while waiting, he associated naturally with the men of his calling in
  the port. These were of two kinds. Some, very few and seen there but
  seldom, led mysterious lives, had preserved an undefaced energy with the
  temper of buccaneers and the eyes of dreamers. They appeared to live
  in a crazy maze of plans, hopes, dangers, enterprises, ahead of
  civilisation, in the dark places of the sea; and their death was the
  only event of their fantastic existence that seemed to have a reasonable
  certitude of achievement. The majority were men who, like himself,
  thrown there by some accident, had remained as officers of country
  ships. They had now a horror of the home service, with its harder
  conditions, severer view of duty, and the hazard of stormy oceans. They
  were attuned to the eternal peace of Eastern sky and sea. They
  loved short passages, good deck-chairs, large native crews, and the
  distinction of being white. They shuddered at the thought of hard work,
  and led precariously easy lives, always on the verge of dismissal,
  always on the verge of engagement, serving Chinamen, Arabs,
  half-castes--would have served the devil himself had he made it easy
  enough. They talked everlastingly of turns of luck: how So-and-so got
  charge of a boat on the coast of China--a soft thing; how this one had
  an easy billet in Japan somewhere, and that one was doing well in the
  Siamese navy; and in all they said--in their actions, in their looks, in
  their persons--could be detected the soft spot, the place of decay, the
  determination to lounge safely through existence.
  
  To Jim that gossiping crowd, viewed as seamen, seemed at first more
  unsubstantial than so many shadows. But at length he found a fascination
  in the sight of those men, in their appearance of doing so well on
  such a small allowance of danger and toil. In time, beside the original
  disdain there grew up slowly another sentiment; and suddenly, giving up
  the idea of going home, he took a berth as chief mate of the Patna.
  
  The Patna was a local steamer as old as the hills, lean like a
  greyhound, and eaten up with rust worse than a condemned water-tank. She
  was owned by a Chinaman, chartered by an Arab, and commanded by a sort
  of renegade New South Wales German, very anxious to curse publicly
  his native country, but who, apparently on the strength of Bismarck's
  victorious policy, brutalised all those he was not afraid of, and wore a
  'blood-and-iron' air,' combined with a purple nose and a red moustache.
  After she had been painted outside and whitewashed inside, eight hundred
  pilgrims (more or less) were driven on board of her as she lay with
  steam up alongside a wooden jetty.
  
  They streamed aboard over three gangways, they streamed in urged by
  faith and the hope of paradise, they streamed in with a continuous tramp
  and shuffle of bare feet, without a word, a murmur, or a look back; and
  when clear of confining rails spread on all sides over the deck, flowed
  forward and aft, overflowed down the yawning hatchways, filled the inner
  recesses of the ship--like water filling a cistern, like water flowing
  into crevices and crannies, like water rising silently even with the
  rim. Eight hundred men and women with faith and hopes, with affections
  and memories, they had collected there, coming from north and south
  and from the outskirts of the East, after treading the jungle paths,
  descending the rivers, coasting in praus along the shallows, crossing in
  small canoes from island to island, passing through suffering, meeting
  strange sights, beset by strange fears, upheld by one desire. They
  came from solitary huts in the wilderness, from populous campongs, from
  villages by the sea. At the call of an idea they had left their forests,
  their clearings, the protection of their rulers, their prosperity,
  their poverty, the surroundings of their youth and the graves of their
  fathers. They came covered with dust, with sweat, with grime, with
  rags--the strong men at the head of family parties, the lean old men
  pressing forward without hope of return; young boys with fearless eyes
  glancing curiously, shy little girls with tumbled long hair; the timid
  women muffled up and clasping to their breasts, wrapped in loose ends of
  soiled head-cloths, their sleeping babies, the unconscious pilgrims of
  an exacting belief.
  
  'Look at dese cattle,' said the German skipper to his new chief mate.
  
  An Arab, the leader of that pious voyage, came last. He walked slowly
  aboard, handsome and grave in his white gown and large turban. A string
  of servants followed, loaded with his luggage; the Patna cast off and
  backed away from the wharf.
  
  She was headed between two small islets, crossed obliquely the
  anchoring-ground of sailing-ships, swung through half a circle in the
  shadow of a hill, then ranged close to a ledge of foaming reefs. The
  Arab, standing up aft, recited aloud the prayer of travellers by sea.
  He invoked the favour of the Most High upon that journey, implored His
  blessing on men's toil and on the secret purposes of their hearts; the
  steamer pounded in the dusk the calm water of the Strait; and far astern
  of the pilgrim ship a screw-pile lighthouse, planted by unbelievers on
  a treacherous shoal, seemed to wink at her its eye of flame, as if in
  derision of her errand of faith.
  
  She cleared the Strait, crossed the bay, continued on her way through
  the 'One-degree' passage. She held on straight for the Red Sea under a
  serene sky, under a sky scorching and unclouded, enveloped in a fulgor
  of sunshine that killed all thought, oppressed the heart, withered all
  impulses of strength and energy. And under the sinister splendour of
  that sky the sea, blue and profound, remained still, without a stir,
  without a ripple, without a wrinkle--viscous, stagnant, dead. The
  Patna, with a slight hiss, passed over that plain, luminous and smooth,
  unrolled a black ribbon of smoke across the sky, left behind her on the
  water a white ribbon of foam that vanished at once, like the phantom of
  a track drawn upon a lifeless sea by the phantom of a steamer.
  
  Every morning the sun, as if keeping pace in his revolutions with the
  progress of the pilgrimage, emerged with a silent burst of light exactly
  at the same distance astern of the ship, caught up with her at noon,
  pouring the concentrated fire of his rays on the pious purposes of the
  men, glided past on his descent, and sank mysteriously into the sea
  evening after evening, preserving the same distance ahead of her
  advancing bows. The five whites on board lived amidships, isolated from
  the human cargo. The awnings covered the deck with a white roof from
  stem to stern, and a faint hum, a low murmur of sad voices, alone
  revealed the presence of a crowd of people upon the great blaze of the
  ocean. Such were the days, still, hot, heavy, disappearing one by one
  into the past, as if falling into an abyss for ever open in the wake
  of the ship; and the ship, lonely under a wisp of smoke, held on her
  steadfast way black and smouldering in a luminous immensity, as if
  scorched by a flame flicked at her from a heaven without pity.
  
  The nights descended on her like a benediction.A marvellous stillness pervaded the world, and the stars, together with
  the serenity of their rays, seemed to shed upon the earth the assurance
  of everlasting security. The young moon recurved, and shining low in the
  west, was like a slender shaving thrown up from a bar of gold, and the
  Arabian Sea, smooth and cool to the eye like a sheet of ice, extended
  its perfect level to the perfect circle of a dark horizon. The propeller
  turned without a check, as though its beat had been part of the scheme
  of a safe universe; and on each side of the Patna two deep folds of
  water, permanent and sombre on the unwrinkled shimmer, enclosed within
  their straight and diverging ridges a few white swirls of foam bursting
  in a low hiss, a few wavelets, a few ripples, a few undulations that,
  left behind, agitated the surface of the sea for an instant after the
  passage of the ship, subsided splashing gently, calmed down at last
  into the circular stillness of water and sky with the black speck of the
  moving hull remaining everlastingly in its centre.
  
  Jim on the bridge was penetrated by the great certitude of unbounded
  safety and peace that could be read on the silent aspect of nature like
  the certitude of fostering love upon the placid tenderness of a mother's
  face. Below the roof of awnings, surrendered to the wisdom of white men
  and to their courage, trusting the power of their unbelief and the iron
  shell of their fire-ship, the pilgrims of an exacting faith slept
  on mats, on blankets, on bare planks, on every deck, in all the dark
  corners, wrapped in dyed cloths, muffled in soiled rags, with their
  heads resting on small bundles, with their faces pressed to bent
  forearms: the men, the women, the children; the old with the young, the
  decrepit with the lusty--all equal before sleep, death's brother.
  
  A draught of air, fanned from forward by the speed of the ship, passed
  steadily through the long gloom between the high bulwarks, swept over
  the rows of prone bodies; a few dim flames in globe-lamps were hung
  short here and there under the ridge-poles, and in the blurred circles
  of light thrown down and trembling slightly to the unceasing vibration
  of the ship appeared a chin upturned, two closed eyelids, a dark hand
  with silver rings, a meagre limb draped in a torn covering, a head bent
  back, a naked foot, a throat bared and stretched as if offering itself
  to the knife. The well-to-do had made for their families shelters with
  heavy boxes and dusty mats; the poor reposed side by side with all they
  had on earth tied up in a rag under their heads; the lone old men slept,
  with drawn-up legs, upon their prayer-carpets, with their hands over
  their ears and one elbow on each side of the face; a father, his
  shoulders up and his knees under his forehead, dozed dejectedly by a
  boy who slept on his back with tousled hair and one arm commandingly
  extended; a woman covered from head to foot, like a corpse, with a piece
  of white sheeting, had a naked child in the hollow of each arm; the
  Arab's belongings, piled right aft, made a heavy mound of broken
  outlines, with a cargo-lamp swung above, and a great confusion of
  vague forms behind: gleams of paunchy brass pots, the foot-rest of a
  deck-chair, blades of spears, the straight scabbard of an old sword
  leaning against a heap of pillows, the spout of a tin coffee-pot. The
  patent log on the taffrail periodically rang a single tinkling stroke
  for every mile traversed on an errand of faith. Above the mass of
  sleepers a faint and patient sigh at times floated, the exhalation of a
  troubled dream; and short metallic clangs bursting out suddenly in the
  depths of the ship, the harsh scrape of a shovel, the violent slam of a
  furnace-door, exploded brutally, as if the men handling the mysterious
  things below had their breasts full of fierce anger: while the slim high
  hull of the steamer went on evenly ahead, without a sway of her bare
  masts, cleaving continuously the great calm of the waters under the
  inaccessible serenity of the sky.
  
  Jim paced athwart, and his footsteps in the vast silence were loud to
  his own ears, as if echoed by the watchful stars: his eyes, roaming
  about the line of the horizon, seemed to gaze hungrily into the
  unattainable, and did not see the shadow of the coming event. The only
  shadow on the sea was the shadow of the black smoke pouring heavily from
  the funnel its immense streamer, whose end was constantly dissolving in
  the air. Two Malays, silent and almost motionless, steered, one on each
  side of the wheel, whose brass rim shone fragmentarily in the oval
  of light thrown out by the binnacle. Now and then a hand, with black
  fingers alternately letting go and catching hold of revolving spokes,
  appeared in the illumined part; the links of wheel-chains ground heavily
  in the grooves of the barrel. Jim would glance at the compass, would
  glance around the unattainable horizon, would stretch himself till his
  joints cracked, with a leisurely twist of the body, in the very excess
  of well-being; and, as if made audacious by the invincible aspect of the
  peace, he felt he cared for nothing that could happen to him to the end
  of his days. From time to time he glanced idly at a chart pegged
  out with four drawing-pins on a low three-legged table abaft the
  steering-gear case. The sheet of paper portraying the depths of the sea
  presented a shiny surface under the light of a bull's-eye lamp lashed to
  a stanchion, a surface as level and smooth as the glimmering surface of
  the waters. Parallel rulers with a pair of dividers reposed on it; the
  ship's position at last noon was marked with a small black cross, and
  the straight pencil-line drawn firmly as far as Perim figured the course
  of the ship--the path of souls towards the holy place, the promise of
  salvation, the reward of eternal life--while the pencil with its sharp
  end touching the Somali coast lay round and still like a naked ship's
  spar floating in the pool of a sheltered dock. 'How steady she goes,'
  thought Jim with wonder, with something like gratitude for this high
  peace of sea and sky. At such times his thoughts would be full of
  valorous deeds: he loved these dreams and the success of his imaginary
  achievements. They were the best parts of life, its secret truth, its
  hidden reality. They had a gorgeous virility, the charm of vagueness,
  they passed before him with an heroic tread; they carried his soul away
  with them and made it drunk with the divine philtre of an unbounded
  confidence in itself. There was nothing he could not face. He was so
  pleased with the idea that he smiled, keeping perfunctorily his eyes
  ahead; and when he happened to glance back he saw the white streak of
  the wake drawn as straight by the ship's keel upon the sea as the black
  line drawn by the pencil upon the chart.
  
  The ash-buckets racketed, clanking up and down the stoke-hold
  ventilators, and this tin-pot clatter warned him the end of his watch
  was near. He sighed with content, with regret as well at having to
  part from that serenity which fostered the adventurous freedom of his
  thoughts. He was a little sleepy too, and felt a pleasurable languor
  running through every limb as though all the blood in his body had
  turned to warm milk. His skipper had come up noiselessly, in pyjamas and
  with his sleeping-jacket flung wide open. Red of face, only half awake,
  the left eye partly closed, the right staring stupid and glassy, he hung
  his big head over the chart and scratched his ribs sleepily. There was
  something obscene in the sight of his naked flesh. His bared breast
  glistened soft and greasy as though he had sweated out his fat in his
  sleep. He pronounced a professional remark in a voice harsh and dead,
  resembling the rasping sound of a wood-file on the edge of a plank; the
  fold of his double chin hung like a bag triced up close under the hinge
  of his jaw. Jim started, and his answer was full of deference; but
  the odious and fleshy figure, as though seen for the first time in a
  revealing moment, fixed itself in his memory for ever as the incarnation
  of everything vile and base that lurks in the world we love: in our own
  hearts we trust for our salvation, in the men that surround us, in the
  sights that fill our eyes, in the sounds that fill our ears, and in the
  air that fills our lungs.
  
  The thin gold shaving of the moon floating slowly downwards had lost
  itself on the darkened surface of the waters, and the eternity beyond
  the sky seemed to come down nearer to the earth, with the augmented
  glitter of the stars, with the more profound sombreness in the lustre of
  the half-transparent dome covering the flat disc of an opaque sea. The
  ship moved so smoothly that her onward motion was imperceptible to the
  senses of men, as though she had been a crowded planet speeding through
  the dark spaces of ether behind the swarm of suns, in the appalling and
  calm solitudes awaiting the breath of future creations. 'Hot is no name
  for it down below,' said a voice.
  
  Jim smiled without looking round. The skipper presented an unmoved
  breadth of back: it was the renegade's trick to appear pointedly unaware
  of your existence unless it suited his purpose to turn at you with a
  devouring glare before he let loose a torrent of foamy, abusive jargon
  that came like a gush from a sewer. Now he emitted only a sulky grunt;
  the second engineer at the head of the bridge-ladder, kneading with
  damp palms a dirty sweat-rag, unabashed, continued the tale of his
  complaints. The sailors had a good time of it up here, and what was the
  use of them in the world he would be blowed if he could see. The poor
  devils of engineers had to get the ship along anyhow, and they could
  very well do the rest too; by gosh they--'Shut up!' growled the German
  stolidly. 'Oh yes! Shut up--and when anything goes wrong you fly to
  us, don't you?' went on the other. He was more than half cooked, he
  expected; but anyway, now, he did not mind how much he sinned, because
  these last three days he had passed through a fine course of training
  for the place where the bad boys go when they die--b'gosh, he
  had--besides being made jolly well deaf by the blasted racket below.
  The durned, compound, surface-condensing, rotten scrap-heap rattled and
  banged down there like an old deck-winch, only more so; and what made
  him risk his life every night and day that God made amongst the refuse
  of a breaking-up yard flying round at fifty-seven revolutions, was more
  than _he_ could tell. He must have been born reckless, b'gosh.
  He . . . 'Where did you get drink?' inquired the German, very savage; but
  motionless in the light of the binnacle, like a clumsy effigy of a
  man cut out of a block of fat. Jim went on smiling at the retreating
  horizon; his heart was full of generous impulses, and his thought was
  contemplating his own superiority. 'Drink!' repeated the engineer with
  amiable scorn: he was hanging on with both hands to the rail, a shadowy
  figure with flexible legs. 'Not from you, captain. You're far too mean,
  b'gosh. You would let a good man die sooner than give him a drop of
  schnapps. That's what you Germans call economy. Penny wise, pound
  foolish.' He became sentimental. The chief had given him a four-finger
  nip about ten o'clock--'only one, s'elp me!'--good old chief; but as to
  getting the old fraud out of his bunk--a five-ton crane couldn't do
  it. Not it. Not to-night anyhow. He was sleeping sweetly like a little
  child, with a bottle of prime brandy under his pillow. From the thick
  throat of the commander of the Patna came a low rumble, on which the
  sound of the word schwein fluttered high and low like a capricious
  feather in a faint stir of air. He and the chief engineer had been
  cronies for a good few years--serving the same jovial, crafty, old
  Chinaman, with horn-rimmed goggles and strings of red silk plaited into
  the venerable grey hairs of his pigtail. The quay-side opinion in the
  Patna's home-port was that these two in the way of brazen peculation
  'had done together pretty well everything you can think of.' Outwardly
  they were badly matched: one dull-eyed, malevolent, and of soft fleshy
  curves; the other lean, all hollows, with a head long and bony like the
  head of an old horse, with sunken cheeks, with sunken temples, with an
  indifferent glazed glance of sunken eyes. He had been stranded out East
  somewhere--in Canton, in Shanghai, or perhaps in Yokohama; he probably
  did not care to remember himself the exact locality, nor yet the cause
  of his shipwreck. He had been, in mercy to his youth, kicked quietly
  out of his ship twenty years ago or more, and it might have been so much
  worse for him that the memory of the episode had in it hardly a trace
  of misfortune. Then, steam navigation expanding in these seas and men
  of his craft being scarce at first, he had 'got on' after a sort. He
  was eager to let strangers know in a dismal mumble that he was 'an old
  stager out here.' When he moved, a skeleton seemed to sway loose in his
  clothes; his walk was mere wandering, and he was given to wander thus
  around the engine-room skylight, smoking, without relish, doctored
  tobacco in a brass bowl at the end of a cherrywood stem four feet long,
  with the imbecile gravity of a thinker evolving a system of philosophy
  from the hazy glimpse of a truth. He was usually anything but free with
  his private store of liquor; but on that night he had departed from his
  principles, so that his second, a weak-headed child of Wapping, what
  with the unexpectedness of the treat and the strength of the stuff,
  had become very happy, cheeky, and talkative. The fury of the New South
  Wales German was extreme; he puffed like an exhaust-pipe, and Jim,
  faintly amused by the scene, was impatient for the time when he could
  get below: the last ten minutes of the watch were irritating like a
  gun that hangs fire; those men did not belong to the world of heroic
  adventure; they weren't bad chaps though. Even the skipper himself . . .
  His gorge rose at the mass of panting flesh from which issued
  gurgling mutters, a cloudy trickle of filthy expressions; but he was
  too pleasurably languid to dislike actively this or any other thing. The
  quality of these men did not matter; he rubbed shoulders with them, but
  they could not touch him; he shared the air they breathed, but he was
  different. . . . Would the skipper go for the engineer? . . . The life
  was easy and he was too sure of himself--too sure of himself to . . .
  The line dividing his meditation from a surreptitious doze on his feet
  was thinner than a thread in a spider's web.
  
  The second engineer was coming by easy transitions to the consideration
  of his finances and of his courage.
  
  'Who's drunk? I? No, no, captain! That won't do. You ought to know by
  this time the chief ain't free-hearted enough to make a sparrow drunk,
  b'gosh. I've never been the worse for liquor in my life; the stuff ain't
  made yet that would make _me_ drunk. I could drink liquid fire against
  your whisky peg for peg, b'gosh, and keep as cool as a cucumber. If I
  thought I was drunk I would jump overboard--do away with myself, b'gosh.
  I would! Straight! And I won't go off the bridge. Where do you expect
  me to take the air on a night like this, eh? On deck amongst that vermin
  down there? Likely--ain't it! And I am not afraid of anything you can
  do.'
  
  The German lifted two heavy fists to heaven and shook them a little
  without a word.
  
  'I don't know what fear is,' pursued the engineer, with the enthusiasm
  of sincere conviction. 'I am not afraid of doing all the bloomin' work
  in this rotten hooker, b'gosh! And a jolly good thing for you that there
  are some of us about the world that aren't afraid of their lives, or
  where would you be--you and this old thing here with her plates like
  brown paper--brown paper, s'elp me? It's all very fine for you--you
  get a power of pieces out of her one way and another; but what about
  me--what do I get? A measly hundred and fifty dollars a month and
  find yourself. I wish to ask you respectfully--respectfully, mind--who
  wouldn't chuck a dratted job like this? 'Tain't safe, s'elp me, it
  ain't! Only I am one of them fearless fellows . . .'
  
  He let go the rail and made ample gestures as if demonstrating in
  the air the shape and extent of his valour; his thin voice darted in
  prolonged squeaks upon the sea, he tiptoed back and forth for the better
  emphasis of utterance, and suddenly pitched down head-first as though he
  had been clubbed from behind. He said 'Damn!' as he tumbled; an instant
  of silence followed upon his screeching: Jim and the skipper staggered
  forward by common accord, and catching themselves up, stood very stiff
  and still gazing, amazed, at the undisturbed level of the sea. Then they
  looked upwards at the stars.
  
  What had happened? The wheezy thump of the engines went on. Had the
  earth been checked in her course? They could not understand; and
  suddenly the calm sea, the sky without a cloud, appeared formidably
  insecure in their immobility, as if poised on the brow of yawning
  destruction. The engineer rebounded vertically full length and collapsed
  again into a vague heap. This heap said 'What's that?' in the muffled
  accents of profound grief. A faint noise as of thunder, of thunder
  infinitely remote, less than a sound, hardly more than a vibration,
  passed slowly, and the ship quivered in response, as if the thunder had
  growled deep down in the water. The eyes of the two Malays at the wheel
  glittered towards the white men, but their dark hands remained closed
  on the spokes. The sharp hull driving on its way seemed to rise a few
  inches in succession through its whole length, as though it had become
  pliable, and settled down again rigidly to its work of cleaving the
  smooth surface of the sea. Its quivering stopped, and the faint noise
  of thunder ceased all at once, as though the ship had steamed across a
  narrow belt of vibrating water and of humming air.
  
feat_summary_name: Chapters 1-3
target: Lord Jim begins with the powerful physical description of a man "an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built." He has a deep voice and immaculate dress, being white "from shoes to hat," and he makes his living as a water-clerk in "various Eastern ports." He is "very popular." This image is layered with attributes that arise in a consideration of what is required to be a water-clerk of quality. Thus the reader learns that the man has "Ability in the abstract" and that he is able to apply it "practically." The man is called "Jim." Jim comes to be known as "Tuan Jim" or "Lord Jim" among the Malays of the jungle village where he lives "incognito." Answering just how he becomes "Lord Jim" and just why he is "incognito" is the project of the tale. Jim is rootless, moving farther and farther east, escaping whatever fact of his history that seems to be following him. Born the son of a parson, he is answering the call of the sea. He is smart, physically fit, and a dreamer of danger and success. The reader, however, now learns of a collision at sea where Jim leapt to his feet but was beaten. "Too late, youngster," the captain of the ship tells him, as the glory of the rescue falls like a wreath over the bowman, who jumped first, "a boy with a face like a girl's and big grey eyes." Jim is angry and frustrated with his missed opportunity to be a hero. Two years of training and life on the sea pass, and Jim feels let down by the humdrum nature of his experiences. The sea, he feels, is not so full of the adventures he once imagined. Jim is "chief mate of a fine ship, without ever having been tested" . He spends some time on his back because of an injury and is left at a hospital in an "Eastern port." When able, Jim descends into the nearby port town and studies the nature of men and life around him, all sharing the same calling of the sea. In time, he discards the idea of returning to England and chooses, instead, to become chief mate of the Patna, an old local steamer, manned by a vastly overweight New South Wales German captain. The steamer is headed for Mecca with eight hundred pilgrims led by an Arab leader in white, who offers a prayer. There are only five white men on board. At night, as Jim contemplates the Arabian Sea from the bridge of the steamer, the speed steady, and the human landscape of passengers asleep, fathers and sons, beneath him, he considers his romantic dreams--"the success of his imaginary achievements" . The German captain appears with too little clothing; the second engineer complains. A conversation takes place regarding drink and being drunk, and then fear and courage, but "those men did not belong to the world of heroic adventure" . Suddenly, the three of them are lurched by the force of a disturbance beneath the boat. The sound is like the "faint noise of thunder ... hardly more than a vibration" .
feat_summary_analysis: Lord Jim begins with a direct, close-up view of its subject: Jim.  His physical description is at first powerfully impressed upon the reader, and then the reader encounters the mysterious manner in which he drifts through the world.  He is a clean-cut, well-liked young man, but the mystery is that he is constantly trying to outrun or escape a fact of his past.  The reader is brought into a state of curiosity.  Who is this young man?  Why is he trying to maintain himself incognito?  Why is he a water-clerk, when he appears to be gifted with intelligence and talent?  And, most importantly, what is the fact from which he is so energetically trying to escape? The reference to Jim as having "Ability in the abstract" is crucial to the construction of his character in the novel.  He is gifted with a kind of genius, but it only exists in an abstract way.  The effort is then to realize this "ability" in the real world, to take action, to create change, and to realize the potential of such an "ability."  It is further important to note that Jim is never given a surname throughout the narrative.  In this way, the lone "Jim" strikes the reader as intimately present yet anonymous, illustrating precisely the kind of ambiguity for which Conrad is famous. When the reader is then told that Jim becomes "Tuan Jim" or "Lord Jim," Conrad drives the dramatic motion of the novel by causing curiosity regarding how Jim will attain this title. The view in the narrative then cuts to a significant moment in his personal history, the occasion when he was too late in seizing the opportunity to rescue a person at sea.  Angry with the lost opportunity, Jim expresses his romantic temperament; this part of the tale also allows us to see his motivations for pursuing a life at sea in the first place.  He is a dreamer, and he seems to be confident of some aspect of his self as being more than capable of achieving his dreams.  This dreaming quality is characteristic of much of the driving force for young men to pursue a life at sea, and in this way Jim becomes a quintessential example of youthful aspiration.  A question is then immediately suggested: how will Jim mature?  How will he move from being a dreaming young man to the man running from his past and then a man with the title "Lord Jim"? One night, Jim observes his fellow crew members, thinking that they are not part of the world of "heroic adventure."  Thus Jim differentiates himself: "he shared the air they breathed, but he was different" .  Now, as the sudden and strange vibration occurs beneath the ship, the situation leads us to ask: will Jim be able to prove his difference?