Lord Jim: Chapter 36 Summary & Analysis

Marlow has finally finished telling the long story of Jim’s life at the dinner party in the present day. His audience breaks up, and some go to the veranda. Many of the men in attendance have their own reactions to the story, but only one man ever hears the full ending. Marlow writes to this man two years later, sending him a thick packet. The “privileged reader” who receives the letter looks out his window at a lighthouse. He notices that Marlow’s packet contains three items: many pages pinned together in Marlow’s handwriting, a gray paper with unfamiliar handwriting, and a letter of explanation from Marlow. As the man inspects further, the explanatory letter has yet another letter with it.

The privileged reader begins reading Marlow’s letter. In it, Marlow writes that the privileged reader seemed interested in Jim’s fate and assumes that the man hasn’t forgotten Jim’s story. At the time, the man didn’t believe Jim had truly mastered his fate, despite Marlow’s claims otherwise. The man told Marlow that for Jim to give up his life for “them” was brutish (with Marlow inferring that “them” meant “all of mankind with skins brown, yellow, black in colour”). The man, according to Marlow’s letter, believed that such a sacrifice was only permissible if one maintained proper ideas about race.

In his letter, Marlow recalls how Jim tried to write him once. Jim signed the letter from “The Fort, Patusan,” suggesting that he had begun to fortify himself against possible attacks. In the letter, Jim begins writing with a splotchy hand that something terrible has happened, but that’s as far as he gets.

In his letter, Marlow explains that one of the other letters enclosed in the packet is from Jim’s father, and that Jim kept the letter carefully preserved in his writing desk. Jim’s father wrote the letter a few days before Jim joined the Patna, so this means Jim kept it with him for a long time. In the letter, Jim’s father advises Jim not to judge people too quickly or severely, then he updates Jim about various people’s lives and about some of Jim’s old pets. Marlow closes his letter by saying that he has heard the final events of Jim’s story and can imagine them so vividly that he feels like an eyewitness, even though he is putting it all together from fragments.