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

exoticized other) can be comprehended only in terms of the familiar. We learn about
the irregularities and aberrations of stars, not their conformities. And we are
interested in their conduct, an anthropomorphization, and in their light—literally the
light of a star, but also echoing the light of the dream. There is no reason to expect the
Patusan episode to conform to Western genre narratives—especially after Marlow
insists again on the difference of what is to come: “had Stein arranged to send him
into a star of the fifth magnitude the change could not have been greater” (Conrad
132). The key here, though, is the arrangement: Marlow and Stein have arranged for
an end for Jim, and that end, like any journey into a star, can only be death.
Wandering aimlessly in the center of the circle, Jim is at last given a purpose, but
Marlow allows no end-purpose other than an abyss of flames. The middle of Lord
Jim, then, is a conspiracy between Stein, Marlow, and Conrad to arrange an end for
Jim and for the novel. As arranged by human characters, this end must feature the
blunter generic narrative that follows.
Lord Jim’s narrative middle, then, is deeply bound up in its shaping of the
novel’s ending and its disruption of a narrative that had been motivated by beginnings
(Jim’s biography, the Patna episode). This chapter has sketched out a reading in
which Jim’s submission to execution by Doramin completes the action of the Patna
episode. None of this, however, solves the initial problems of the text: what happened
on the Patna, and why? To these—and to Marlow’s inquiries into Jim’s character—
there can be only simple answers or no answers. The problems cannot be solved to
the satisfaction of the text that has been built up in Marlow’s oral narrative. Instead, it
answers the questions posed in the Stein episode: what will become of Jim? The
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