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Chapter 8
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Lord Jim, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Fantasy vs. Reality
Justice and Duty
Racism and Colonialism
Truth and Perspective
Summary
Analysis
Over dinner, Jim tells Marlow that when he was back on the Patna, he just wished the boat would sink. The skipper, meanwhile, orders them around as they try to get the rescue boat down. All of a sudden, Jim looks over and sees a black squall on the horizon. He feels trapped, and even the memory of this causes him to gasp in his chair at dinner with Marlow.
Jim is aware of his own selfishness, and this is part of why he hates himself. In this section, he wishes that 800 people will drown so that his own conscience will feel better about abandoning the ship.
Themes
Literary Devices
An engineer (one of the two engineers) convinces Jim that they have to move quickly because otherwise the pilgrims will see them trying to leave and possibly try to steal their boat from them. Nevertheless, Jim keeps his distance as they get the boat down. Jim hates them all as he watches them with the boat. He closes his eyes and waits for what he believes will be certain doom, but he finds he can’t keep his eyes shut. Suddenly, he feels the boat dip and move more than it has in a long time.
Jim is relating the Patna incident to Marlow after the fact. This means that his perspective does not necessarily represent how he was feeling at the time—it instead reflects how he has chosen to make sense of events after the fact. Jim is hard on himself in some ways (since he could never have saved 800 people by himself) but lenient in others (since he constantly portrays himself as intending to be a hero, even when he fails to act heroically).
Themes
Jim sees George, the third engineer of the Patna, collapse and die, seemingly of a heart attack. Jim muses that if George had just kept still instead of rushing around to save his life, he might have lived.
Jim sees himself as a passive observer of the actions on the Patna. After a while, Jim gets up and stumbles over the legs of George, the dead third engineer (although Jim didn’t know he was dead at the time). The skipper and the other two engineers are already in the boat, calling for George, the only dead man on a ship with 800 other living people on it.
The passive terms that Jim uses to describe his actions once again reflect the disconnect between Jim’s idealistic intentions and his heroic self-image with his imperfect and cowardly real actions.
Themes
Literary Devices
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Jim skips ahead in the story. Suddenly, he’s in the boat with the skipper. “I had jumped… It seems,” he says. Jim says it’s like he blacked out and didn’t even know where he was until he looked up. In the process he injured his ribs. The Patna looms over their smaller boat.
The disconnect between Jim’s thoughts and actions is so great that he can’t even tell the part of the story where he decides to abandon ship—perhaps he’s so ashamed of his behavior that he really has blocked it out of his brain.
Themes
