304 Crane, Stephen
Justice in Lord Jim
The notion of “justice” implies a sense of balance in
relation to which a perceived “disorder” or “imbal-
ance” is measured. The critic Georg Lukács points
out that art is a search for a kind of formal balance in
a prosaic world, but he continues that an epic world,
on the other hand, “is the perfect theodicy in which
crime and punishment lie in the scales of the world
justice as equal, mutually homogenous weights.”
Lord Jim consists of two largely imbalanced nar-
rative halves, one situated in a troubled, modern
world, and one situated within an epic, romantic
setting. In each narrative, Jim is the main character
facing punishment, having been found guilty of an
act of misjudgement (abandoning the Patna; letting
Gentleman Brown slip away).
During the first half of the novel, we hear the story
of Jim’s misfortune aboard the Patna when he fatally
misjudges the situation and leaves the ship after it has
collided with an unknown object, abandoning 800
Moslem pilgrims to their tragic fate. When the subse-
quent inquiry disgraces him by declaring him guilty of
cowardice, Marlow—the story’s narrator—becomes
interested in the “justice” of the process, less because
he disagrees with the verdict, and more ambiguously
because he identifies Jim as “one of us.”
The ambiguity of Marlow’s interest in Jim’s fate
tells us something important about the way in which
justice represents a problem in the novel. To Marlow,
human judgments and laws are always haunted by
chance, luck, and imperfection. At one point, he
nihilistically muses: “Truth shall prevail.... Yes,
when it gets a chance. There is a law, no doubt—and
likewise a law regulates your luck in the throwing of
dice. It is not Justice the servant of men, but acci-
dent, hazard, Fortune—the ally of patient Time—
that holds an even and scrupulous balance.”
On one level, the naval court’s verdict may be
fair and just, but it also fails to take into account
a deeper aspect of Jim’s character that fascinates
Marlow, because it reveals a perversity, a contradic-
tion, hidden within the relationship between the
concept of justice and individual judgment—a ten-
sion between ideal and action. Jim may be convicted
by the court on the basis of his flawed judgment as
a sailor aboard the Patna, but his integrity, his sense
of justice, remains intact throughout the trial (while
the rest of the crew members, realizing they will not
receive a fair hearing, run away).
Marlow’s narrative, itself an amalgam of coinci-
dental information, gossip, and rumors, can be seen
as an attempt to construct an alternative to the public
image of Jim’s character, not so much in order to
undermine the court’s verdict but, rather, to explore
the complex reasons underneath Jim’s flawed judg-
ment and, hence, do justice to Jim’s character, as “one
of us.”
On the distant island Patusan, Jim restores his
damaged heroic identity. But after his encounter
with Gentleman Brown and ill-judged decision
to let him go, Jim yet again finds himself facing a
verdict, this time fatally when Doramin shoots him.
While Jim accepted his verdict by the naval court
for failing to live up to his responsibilities as a sailor
(as well as his own heroic ideals), this time around
he ironically accepts Doramin’s verdict as a conse-
quence of his attempt to live up to his noble ideal as
a hero: the price of acting heroically (by letting the
crooked pirate go instead of killing him).
Lord Jim explores the ambiguities surrounding
the concept of “justice” in the modern world. Jim
had failed to live up to his heroic ideals when he
should have done (on the Patna), and he ends up
being killed when he should have taken a more
sensible course. Throughout the novel, we are given
numerous examples of a disharmonic world, funda-
mentally out of balance, a world in which Jim’s ideal
of heroism clashes and sinks when confronting the
random forces of reality. “We want a belief in its
necessity and its justice,” Marlow muses, “to make a
worthy and conscious sacrifice of our lives. Without
it the sacrifice is only forgetfulness, the way of offer-
ing is no better than the way to perdition.”
Eli Park SorensenCRANE, STEPHEN “The Open
Boat” (1898)
On the last day of 1896, in Jacksonville, Florida, Ste-
phen Crane (1871–1900) boarded the Commodore
for Cuba, part of a filibustering expedition to supply
Cuban revolutionaries. Before the ship could get far
underway, however, it ran aground, had trouble for
two days, and was then sabotaged and began to sink.