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

narrative” (Attridge 285). In dispute in The Time Machine are the basic facts of the
tale, whereas the facts established at trial in Lord Jim are never under serious dispute.
Instead, in dispute is the causal system of meaning that can place these facts in a
comprehensible narrative. The question of connecting facts to a system of meaning is
at the heart of Lord Jim’s modernist poetics. The mystery of Lord Jim, then, is a
mystery of interpretation, which cannot be resolved by material evidence. By the end
of the oral narrative, this mystery remains: Jim is for Marlow “a vast enigma” (199).
However, at the end of the novel, Marlow still insists that Jim is “inscrutable at heart”
(246). There is also little if anything in the text to indicate that any of the facts of the
narrative are more or less subject to doubt depending on whether they are given by
the first-level narrator in the novel’s beginning, by Marlow as witness and oral
narrator in the novel’s long middle, or by Marlow as editor and written narrator at the
novel’s end. Instead, the reader faces different challenges in processing Jim’s story—
the immediacy and confusion of the Patna episode in the beginning, are replaced with
the challenges of various anachronies, multiple levels of narration, and the weight of
Marlow’s voice as interpreter in the middle and ending. To the extent that these shifts
in the narrative discourse create different points of view, different epistemological
problems, or different ways of engaging the reader with the same epistemological
problems, Marlow’s oral narrative is indeed a modernist middle: a distinct segment of
text that re-configures the novel’s epistemological poetics. However, these
differences do not directly address Lord Jim’s central epistemological problem: the
problem of the interpretation of Jim and his actions. A modernist middle that
addresses these problems re-configure the narrative’s approach to the meaning of
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