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

limits of a night of storytelling. 2 This is the middle of Conrad’s novel, defined both
by Marlow’s speech and by the absence of the knowledge of Jim’s origins we get
from the initial, apparently impersonal or heterodiegetic narrator, as well as the
knowledge of Jim’s death we get from Marlow’s written correspondence. Here,
“Marlow speaking” constitutes the middle of the novel (Lothe 138). In the first five
chapters, an apparently heterodiegetic narrator relates Jim’s early career as a watercarrier,
the circumstances of his life that led him to that profession, the incident on the
Patna, and subsequently when Jim and his superior officers stand trial for abandoning
the ship. Marlow then narrates his own encounters with Jim at the trial and in the
following years. The end of Jim’s tale, including his death, are related again by
Marlow, but this time in a letter, which relates not Marlow’s first-hand knowledge of
Jim, but instead contains what Marlow has been able to piece together from
“fragmentary” information (Conrad 203). We therefore have a plausible modernist
narrative middle, which has different epistemological claims from the beginning and
ending, as well as a different narrative voice.
However, variations in narrative voice, including multiple narrative levels, do
not necessarily indicate modernist technique. In H. G. Well’s The Time Machine
(1895), for example, the Time Traveller’s oral narrative is a second-degree narrative,
contained within the homodiegetic narrator’s story about meeting the Time Traveller.
This metadiegetic narrative takes up most of the novel. The use of homodiegetic
narrators, and particular the metadiegetic oral narration of a fantastical story, could
2 Conrad defends the verisimilitude of the length of Marlow’s oral narrative in his 1917 Author’s Note
to the second English edition of Lord Jim, contending that Marlow’s narrative “can be read through
aloud, I should say, in less than three hours” (Conrad 5).
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