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

for interpreting his own life and the meaning of his actions—to replace the
professional code of conduct that shaped interpretations of Jim’s actions in the first
part of the novel (Baxter 112). Stein provides in Patusan, then, a setting that as
closely as possible mirrors romantic adventure narrative—sets Jim up to play a
prescribed role in a pre-determined narrative. In this sense, Stein actively creates the
shift in the novel’s genre. Stein attempts to remove the framework of professionalism
that, when combined with Jim’s actions failure on the Patna, resulted in the
epistemologically-dominant modernist narrative of the novel’s first half. Yet, this new
romantic framework ultimately results in more epistemological problems, as it cannot
be completely isolated from the rest of Lord Jim. Furthermore, as Baxter shows, Stein
only succeeds in putting a separate code of conduct—and thus a separate narrative
framework—into conflict with the facts of Jim’s life: “If Jim undermines for Marlow
the strength of shared ‘fidelity to a certain standard of conduct’ for the merchant
marine in the first part of the novel, he finally undermines the power of fidelity to a
certain romantic egoism in the second part of the novel. Jim fails the test of each, the
practical and the romantic” (Baxter 115). Stein’s narrative middle re-frames Jim,
from failed professional to striving ego, arresting one story at the middle and
asserting a new one. Yet these stories have a common modernist interest in the
inadequacy of these narrative frameworks to produce narratives that satisfactorily
embed events in a system of causality and meaning.
As Bruss notes, the prominence of Stein in the critical literature derives not
only from his active role in shifting Lord Jim’s narrative genre, but also in part from
his position at the center of the narrative text (Bruss 502). That is, the narrative
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