Joseph Conrad

Lord Jim Joseph Conrad

Lord Jim is a novel by Joseph Conrad and originally published in Blackwood's Magazine between October 1899 and November 1900. This novel is the story of a fall, atonement and purification, a second chance. Jim is a sailor wearing a stain on his past: he has committed an act of cowardice, has supported the abandonment by the officers of a ship that seemed doomed to sink, the Patna, full of Muslim pilgrims. (Conrad is based on real events: the history of steam Jeddah, which took place in the summer of 1880). The ship did not sink, and were judged guilty of neglect. Jim, unlike the others, seeks punishment to alleviate guilt. But the facts leave their mark upon him; you can not forget. Jim lives since a wandering life, trying to escape the guilty memory and the grim look of men. The first part of the work consists of the story, more or less indirectly, of the facts giving rise to the Fall and subsequent Atonement: the abandonment of Patna and its consequences; the trial, which Jim has voluntarily; degradation by court ruling; his meeting with Marlow, who attends the trial and soon conceived an attraction, a fatherly and friendly encouragement to the young enigmatic, which will become confident. It is precisely from this vantage point that acts as narrator Marlow. According to this character -alter ego Conrad, Jim "was a young man lost, unused, one of many in a million like him; but it was one of ours".