ABSTRACT Title of Document: BRITISH MODERNIST ... - DRUM

combines both plot and epistemology. I will argue that the transition at the plot level
of Lord Jim is effected by a transition in epistemology, both through an active reinterpretation
of Jim and his story in the novel’s middle, and through a shift in the
systems of meaning that accompanies a shift in genre. In Lord Jim, plot and
epistemological questions are deeply embedded with each other, marking this novel
as a transitional text between Victorian and modernist middles.
Critics have found different middles for Lord Jim, corresponding to different
ways of dividing the text and different ways of interpreting that division. For
Guerard, “The major break comes not with the introduction of the Patusan material
(Chapters 21, 22) but with the end of Marlow’s oral narrative (Chapter 35). The
important question is whether the novel and its reader are violated in a serious way”
(167-8). Lothe, too, focuses on “the tripartite division of the novel’s narrative: with an
omniscient narrator (chapters 1-4), with Marlow speaking (chapters 5-35), and with
Marlow writing (chapters 36-45)” (138). For Watt, meanwhile, the “central section”
begins with Marlow’s story and ends with Stein (265). Wendy Perkins, on the other
hand, provides a more segmented approach in which small “chapter group[s]” provide
irreconcilable interpretations of Jim and his story (28). Perkins opposes Conrad’s
method to the strict causal chains of the traditional Victorian novel: “The classic
realist text has trained us to expect to find a problem revealed in the beginning of the
novel; solutions posed and avoided (along with possible detours) in the middle; and a
denouement in the final pages that will end equivocations, resolve the problem, and—
in Roland Barthes’ phrase--bring the ‘vast hermeneutic sentence’ to its close” (10-
11). If we define the beginning as the omniscient narrator’s section (the first four
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