Lord Jim

He goes away from a living woman to celebrate his pitiless wedding with a shadowy ideal of conduct. Is he satisfied--quite, now, I wonder? We ought to know. He is one of us--and have I not stood up once, like an evoked ghost, to answer for his eternal constancy?

Nested-revel architecture: Patna jump → court of inquiry → Patusan redemption → Gentleman Brown's invasion → Jim's surrender to Doramin—each section redefines the same moral question, so plot scores 90.

"You are an awful good sort to listen like this," he said. "It does me good. You don't know what it is to me. You don't" . . . words seemed to fail him. It was a distinct glimpse. He was a youngster of the sort you like to see about you

Jim the romantic idealist, Marlow the reluctant witness, Jewel, Stein, Gentleman Brown, Doramin—Conrad's most fully populated moral stage, so cast scores 91.

He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull. His voice was deep, loud, and his manner displayed a kind of dogged self-assertion

Frame narration and retrospective telling slow the Patna section; Patusan expands into tropical romance before final chapters compress catastrophe—pace follows Marlow's meditative rhythm, so pace scores 84.

And that's the end. He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven, and excessively romantic. Not in the wildest days of his boyish visions could he have seen the alluring shape of such an extraordinary success!

Conrad's layered, qualified, endlessly revising sentences—'inscrutable at heart,' 'a shadowy ideal of conduct'—every paragraph a moral deliberation, so prose scores 95.

I don't suppose any of you have ever heard of Patusan? It does not matter; there's many a heavenly body in the lot crowding upon us of a night that mankind had never heard of, either, before some human being, endowed with magic power to see, took notice.

Water-clerk ports, the Patna at sea, Patusan's jungle fort, Stein's butterfly collection—colonial geography as moral laboratory, so world scores 89.

He was spotlessly neat, apparelled in immaculate white from shoes to hat, and in the various Eastern ports where he got his living as ship-chandler's water-clerk he was very popular. A water-clerk need not pass an examination in anything under the sun, but he must have Ability in the abstract

Ch.1—Jim's bull-like advance, the immaculate white, the water-clerk's 'Ability in the abstract'—immediately establishes the gap between appearance and the catastrophe to come, so hook scores 88.

He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven, and excessively romantic. Not in the wildest days of his boyish visions could he have seen the alluring shape of such an extraordinary success!

The nested unreliable narration—Marlow telling Marlow telling Jim—and honour as romantic pathology rather than virtue directly influences modernist moral fiction, so innov scores 94.

He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven, and excessively romantic. Not in the wildest days of his boyish visions could he have seen the alluring shape of such an extraordinary success! For it may very well be that in the short moment of his last supreme pride

Jim walking into Doramin's silver bullet, Marlow's equivocal elegy, Jewel's soundless survival—honour and folly indistinguishable; the closing 'Who knows?' refuses both heroism and condemnation, so ending scores 91.