Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim sees humanity’s darkness

In our guide to the classics series, experts explain key works of literature

For me, no novel provides a better account of what we humans are up against in our pursuit of the true and the good than Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900). It does this alongside Conrad’s other great works, Heart of Darkness (1899) and Nostromo (1904).

Lord Jim reveals that, even in our secular age, we remain creatures of ineluctable faith. Our sense of being good derives from this faith. But the kicker is that, perhaps inevitably, it is a bad faith, because what we do for it – how we reaffirm our faith – is all too often not good.

Conrad scholar Royal Roussel provides the best articulation of this when he says that Conrad’s novels are concerned with “the self’s alienation from the source of its own existence”.

Once we grasp the form of this alienation, we have a key for understanding much that is dark within humanity, from the atrocities of colonisation that Conrad writes about, to the dubious nationalisms and identity politics of our own time. It provides insight into the inability many of us have to scrutinise our own devotions and failings.

Biography and legacy

Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski was born in 1857 in Berdychiv, which is now in Ukraine. At the time, Berdychiv was part of the Russian empire.

Conrad’s parents were intellectuals of noble heritage. They were involved in the Polish nationalist movement, which aimed to preserve Polish heritage in the face of Russification. They were exiled to Russia and died there as a result of the harsh conditions, leaving 11 year old Józef an orphan.

When he was 16, Conrad moved to France and became a sailor. Several years later, he joined the British Merchant Navy, where he rose to the rank of captain. The sea often features in Conrad’s novels, where its vastness stands for many things, including human insignificance, limitless adventure and globalisation.

Conrad, who is one of the very best English prose stylists, only began to seriously study English, his third language, in his 20s. He started writing in his 30s and, in 1894, he gave up sailing and settled in England.

The legacy of Conrad’s writing is immense. As literary critic John Marx puts it, Conrad’s work “announces that the modernist break has occurred”. In his writing, we see the shift to complex narrative structures, unreliable narrators – narrators who are themselves, like Marlow in Lord Jim, characters in the story – and a focus on the psychological and the existential.

Heart of Darkness regularly appears in top-novel lists (it is number 31 in this one); its critique of European colonialism has become foundational to how we view the colonial enterprise. The novel was remade as the film Apocalypse Now, which presents the Vietnam War in the same dark light. My favourite homage to Conrad is that the ship names in the Alien franchise – the Nostromo, the Sulaco and the Patna – are drawn from Conrad’s novels.

An overview

The title of Lord Jim is ironic, even mocking to a degree. Tragically so.

Jim – that’s all we know of his name – is a competent young sailor from solid English stock. His father is a parson: a dispenser of “easy morality”, as Marlow tellingly observes.

Jim’s great test comes when he is first mate – second in command – on the steam ship Patna. The dilapidated Patna, which is carrying 800 Muslim pilgrims to a Red Sea port, strikes something and the front section fills with water. A rusty bulkhead, which seems like it will give way at any moment, is all that stops the ship from sinking.