bility: he unequivocally makes the case that Jim’s life is worthy of Marlow’s
and of rhetorical readers’ quest for its meaning without allowing Marlow or
his audience to complete that quest by arriving at any definitive formulation.
Individual rhetorical readers, like many of the characters in the novel, may
find themselves reaching conclusions about Jim, converting his stubborn-
ness into difficulty. Indeed, if, as Albert Guérard suggests, each of us has a
Patna incident in our lives, then we may find ourselves needing to come to
some determinate judgment about Jim and, indeed, about Marlow’s inability
to reach such a judgment. Nevertheless, precisely because Conrad ends by
underlining Jim’s stubbornness, rhetorical readers are likely to find that any
determinate interpretive and ethical judgments that they make of Jim will be
subject to revision as their own lives progress.
Attending to the affective and ethical consequences of Jim’s stubbornness
also sheds light on the overall completion of the progression. These conse-
quences help us explain why the ending, despite its qualities of indeterminacy
and open-endedness, remains aesthetically satisfying. The affective power
points to Conrad’s ability to combine the resolution of the action in Jim’s track
of the progression with the lack of resolution in Marlow’s narrative quest to
produce an emotionally appropriate conclusion. Conrad’s handling of the eth-
ics of both Marlow’s telling and his own telling enhances rhetorical readers’
ethical engagement and ethical admiration for the open-endedness. In achiev-
ing these effects, Conrad has also demonstrated in his own way something
that Kafka also demonstrated in his: foregrounding the stubbornness of a
major element of a narrative can paradoxically enhance its power.
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