ABSTRACT
‘Youth’ is spoken by Marlow, who later speaks Heart of Darkness and most of Lord Jim: this, then, is the first appearance of the narrative device which revolutionized Conrad’s fiction and helped to make Lord Jim the masterpiece that it is. Like Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness extended itself beyond its initially envisaged length; in a letter of explanation Conrad said ‘it has grown upon me’, and added that ‘anyhow the value is in the detail’. The device of using Marlow as narrator, hit on in the summer of 1898 for ‘Youth’ and employed in its mature form late in 1898 for ‘Heart of Darkness’, showed Conrad how to write Lord Jim. All of the Marlow narration in Lord Jim is advocacy. There are important differences between those works that are part of the literary climate in which Conrad wrote Lord Jim and those that can firmly be said to be ‘sources’.
