Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad

Published 1900 · 307 pages · 130,005 words · about 11 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction

How hard is Lord Jim to read?

Lord Jim scores 63 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 55 out of 100
Conrad's English is literary and sometimes archaic. Nautical terminology and Malay words appear. The vocabulary serves atmosphere and moral weight.
Sentence structure: 65 out of 100
Long, layered sentences with multiple qualifications. Conrad's style is notoriously difficult—clauses nest within clauses. Patience rewards.
Abstraction: 62 out of 100
Concrete adventure carries moral abstraction about honor, cowardice, and redemption. Conrad philosophizes through Marlow's reflections.
Information density: 60 out of 100
Chronological jumping requires tracking. Multiple settings and characters. The density is narrative and moral.
Narrative indirection: 72 out of 100
Marlow tells of hearing from others who heard from others. Time jumps constantly. What happened and what it means stay separate and tangled.
Symbolic density: 58 out of 100
The sea, the abandoned ship, the jungle settlement—images carry weight. Conrad's symbols are present but not imposed.
Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
Marlow observes with sympathetic irony. He understands Jim and judges him simultaneously. The distance is moral and tender.
Resolution withholding: 65 out of 100
Jim's story ends; whether it's redemption remains open. Marlow offers interpretations, not conclusions. You decide what to make of Jim.
Structural complexity: 70 out of 100
Frame narration, time jumps, nested storytelling. The structure itself is the difficulty. Conrad's method matches his theme.

How Lord Jim is regarded

Lord Jim holds a literary regard score of 83 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Where Lord Jim sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (270 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Lord Jim scores 70 out of 100. A second mythos, romance, pulls at it with a weight of 0.3. About the map of stories.

Mode: Low Mimetic
he came from the right place; he was one of us.
Symbol: Formal
They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain anything!
Mythos: Ironic Tragedy (Tragic Pathos) iv (irony iv)
He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven, and excessively romantic.
Genre: Novel + Romance + Confession
he confessed himself before me as though I had the power to bind and to loose

Where the story of Lord Jim takes place

  • Eastern ports, Red Sea steamer and Patusan, 1880s-1890s (1880 to 1895), the main setting
  • Stein's youth: Bavaria, 1848 revolution, Celebes and Wajo States (1848 to 1880)
  • English parsonage and mercantile training-ship, Jim's boyhood (1870 to 1880)

5 things that are true of Lord Jim, with the passage for each

  1. The Malays of the jungle village give Jim his title, Tuan Jim, which is the novel's title.

    They called him Tuan Jim: as one might say—Lord Jim.

  2. Captain Brierly, who sits as an assessor at the inquiry, jumps overboard within a week of its end.

    He jumped overboard at sea barely a week after the end of the inquiry

  3. Jim's mind fixes on the arithmetic of eight hundred pilgrims and only seven boats as the Patna lies stricken.

    Eight hundred people and seven boats—and no time!

  4. Brown's raiding party that attacks Patusan numbers sixteen men from the stolen schooner.

    They were sixteen in all

  5. The Bugis chief Doramin kills Jim with a single pistol shot through the chest, in front of the assembled crowd.

    lifting deliberately his right, shot his son's friend through the chest.

Scenes in Lord Jim that Frye would name

41 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Hamartia, untitled
"I had jumped . . ." He checked himself, averted his gaze. The fatal misstep itself, which Jim cannot own as an act.
Pathos, untitled
lifting deliberately his right, shot his son's friend through the chest. The sacrificial death of the hero, offered unarmed.
Confession, untitled
he confessed himself before me as though I had the power to bind and to loose Jim's sustained introverted self-justification before a confessor-figure.
Sparagmos, untitled
Brown yelled, "Let them have it," and fourteen shots rang out like one. Massacre of the Bugis camp: the community's body torn apart.
Anagnorisis, untitled
Then Jim understood. He had retreated from one world, for a small matter of an impulsive jump, and now the other, the work of his own hands, had fallen in ruins upon his head. Jim's recognition that his second world has collapsed as the first did.
Epos, untitled
with the very first word uttered Marlow's body, extended at rest in the seat, would become very still The oral after-dinner delivery that frames the whole narrative.

Books that share these scenes with Lord Jim

About the author

Joseph Conrad