![]() Marlow’s dedication to getting Jim’s life story right shows that it may be possible to tell the truth-or at least something close to it-but only after considering many different sources and the potential biases they bring. Rather, Lord Jim explores truth by presenting its subject from many different angles. But the novel’s many narrative shifts don’t necessarily mean that it’s impossible to find out a real, true version of events. The end of the book takes this to the extreme, with Marlow sending a package containing several different documents-some of them written in different handwriting and one of which contains many stories within stories-to a nameless character who hasn’t appeared before and is referred to only as the privileged reader. The fractured nature of the book itself reinforces the difficulty of finding the truth, with parts of the story told in traditional narration, parts told as a monologue, and parts told in letters. ![]() Jim, for instance, romanticizes his version of events that he tells Marlow, while Stein is guarded and oblique, and Brown is openly self-serving. ![]() The problem, however, is that Marlow has limited information and so must piece together the truth from multiple sources, not all of which are reliable or fully detailed. Most of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim is narrated by Marlow, who wants to tell the full and true version of Jim's life. ![]()
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