Conrad's Modernism

Conrad’s later novels (in this instance, Lord Jim), I think, show distinct differences in terms of race, between the White Man (Jim) and the community of “natives” in the fictional Patusan. For example, the reader is informed of the differences between Jim and “Jim’s own servant”, Tamb’ Itam (206): while the former is described in terms of his whiteness – “white lord” – the latter has a “complexion [that] was very dark” (206). Racial binaries here are important to the text precisely because different qualities and characteristics are affiliated with different racial terms. By virtue of his ‘whiteness’, Jim as part of a ‘more superior’ race, can become “the virtual ruler of the land” (208). Jim, in other words, becomes like a symbolic White Rajah; he is a Romantic paternalistic figure that leads Patusan to civilization. Conrad is drawing upon traditional tropes of the White Man as the father figure in colonial discourses.


Despite drawing clear racial boundaries, these differences seem to be aestheticized in a modernist manner mainly through employment of multiple narrators and achronological narration. Through different narrators who present Jim’s story differently – Tamb’ Itam, Stein, Jewel etc – the reader is not given one, single, authorial portrait of Jim. Rather, the reader is presented with competing portraits of Jim; ultimately, what the reader is left with is a composite image of Jim. To add to this ‘modernist chaos’, Conrad confuses the time sequence of events, making it difficult for readers to follow the sequence of events that happened. In the Patusan section, as in the Patna section of the novel, there are movements back and forward in time: time goes back to the “seventeenth-century” (173) history of Patusan and time fast-forwards to the date where Marlow saw “the coast of Patusan . . . nearly two years afterwards” (185).

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