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

chapters), and the end as Marlow’s written narrative (Chapters 36-45, the episode of
Gentleman Brown), can we read Lord Jim as conforming to this pattern?
The problem posed by the first four chapters seems to be a problem of facts:
“What had happened?” (Conrad 20). As Guerard observes, Marlow’s entrance serves
not to resolve that problem, but to extend it: “the first narrator could not have justified
much longer such a refusal to explain. But Marlow has a good reason not to tell his
listeners that the Patna didn’t sink” (Guerard 135). Marlow thus serves to extend the
middle. Yet his purpose is not to pose and avoid solutions to the initial
epistemological problem, but to reject it entirely: “They wanted facts, Facts! They
demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain anything!” (Conrad 22). The great
middle embarked upon by Marlow is the result of a rejection of the initial
hermeneutic sentence, to be replaced by an endless inquiry into Jim’s character and,
by extension, the character of the colonial enterprise and all of its participants. The
very first chapter has provided what seems to be a neat solution to the problem even
to the why of Jim’s jump—it has something to do with the influence of his father, as
well as his daydreaming and reading of adventure fiction. Yet the middle continues,
as Lothe, Watt, and Perkins, among others, have observed, constantly re-reading Jim,
never satisfied with an end to interpretation.
In searching in particular for a modernist middle, Lothe’s approach has a
certain obvious appeal, since marks a clear difference in the narrative voice. We may
sympathize with the hearers of Marlow’s oral narrative in Lord Jim—a narrative
middle of sorts that threatens to overwhelm the text as well as, famously, the realistic
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