Lord Jim is written with two distinct
narration styles; the first four chapters are narrated by an omniscient third-person,
not a character but the faceless voice that describes event. From the fifth chapter on,
the narrator is Marlow, who appears in other works by the same author. Marlow is given
to moments of introspection and philosophizing, and so his narration contains many
stream-of-consciousness moments.
"And it's easy enough to talk of Master Jim,
after a good spread, two hundred feet above the sea-level, with a box of decent cigars
handy, on a blessed evening of freshness and starlight that would make the
best of us forget we are only on sufferance here and got to pick our way
in cross lights, watching every precious minute and every irremediable
step, trusting we shall manage yet to go out decently in the end -- but not so sure of
it after all -- and with dashed little help to expect from those we touch
elbows with right and left."
(Conrad, Lord Jim,
gutenberg.org)
Seen in the
above excerpt are standard examples of this writing style; Marlow, speaking to a group
of men, goes off on tangents about the meaning of life and its value. He does not stick
to the straightforward story of Lord Jim's life, but instead takes the opportunity to
explain some of his own personal philosophy. This is similar to Marlow's narration in
Heart of Darkness, but on a much larger scale; where the earlier
novella had a strict three-part format and a short narrative, here Marlow has many
chapters to ramble. The result is a story that is partially hidden by the subjective
views of the narrator; some of the conclusions and judgements reached by the reader are
bound to be affected by Marlow's own views. However, as it stands, Lord
Jim is one of the best examples of the emerging Modernist style in the early
1900s.
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