ABSTRACT
To divide the seamless web of Lord Jim after the account of the jump, in a sense, to rupture it. Jim’s confession has its own beautiful continuity: Jim both shows and tells, revealing his guilty story and enacting the stages in his painful growth towards self-knowledge in response to Marlow’s gentle prompting. Recognition that the feeling that binds a man to a child is common to all men and demonstrates a universal truth about the human heart is a central feature of William Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads. Jim wants comfort, but he also wants moral equivocation. Marlow remarks that Jim believed that ‘age and wisdom can find a remedy against the pain of truth’. The French Lieutenant somewhat resembles Marlow himself: a simple man, reliable, seamanlike, authoritative and also resembling ‘one of those snuffy, quiet village priests, into whose ears are poured the sins, the sufferings, the remorse of peasant generations’.
