Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad (best ebook reader for chromebook .txt) ๐
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Lord Jim was first published as a serial in Blackwoodโs Magazine between October 1899 and November 1900. The first edition of the complete book was published by William Blackwood and Sons in 1900. The story begins when the young British seaman Jim, one of the crew of the steamer Patna, abandons the ship while itโs in distress. The resulting censure prevents Jim from finding stable employment, until a captain named Marlow suggests he find his future in Patusan, a small village on a remote island in the South Seas. There heโs able to earn the respect of the islanders and is dubbed โLord Jim.โ
The abandoning of the Patna by its crew is said to have been based on the real-life abandoning of the S.S. Jeddah in 1880. Lord Jim explores issues of colonialism, dreams of heroism, guilt, failure, and redemption. The book is remarkable for its unusual nested narrative structure, in which Captain Marlow and a number of other characters provide multiple perspectives of the protagonist. The gradual build-up of their richly described viewpoints imparts glimpses of Jimโs inner life, yet ultimately leaves him unknowable.
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- Author: Joseph Conrad
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The ash-buckets racketed, clanking up and down the stokehold ventilators, and this tinpot clatter warned him the end of his watch was near. He sighed with content, with regret as well at having to part from that serenity which fostered the adventurous freedom of his thoughts. He was a little sleepy too, and felt a pleasurable languor running through every limb as though all the blood in his body had turned to warm milk. His skipper had come up noiselessly, in pyjamas and with his sleeping-jacket flung wide open. Red of face, only half awake, the left eye partly closed, the right staring stupid and glassy, he hung his big head over the chart and scratched his ribs sleepily. There was something obscene in the sight of his naked flesh. His bared breast glistened soft and greasy as though he had sweated out his fat in his sleep. He pronounced a professional remark in a voice harsh and dead, resembling the rasping sound of a wood-file on the edge of a plank; the fold of his double chin hung like a bag triced up close under the hinge of his jaw. Jim started, and his answer was full of deference; but the odious and fleshy figure, as though seen for the first time in a revealing moment, fixed itself in his memory forever as the incarnation of everything vile and base that lurks in the world we love: in our own hearts we trust for our salvation, in the men that surround us, in the sights that fill our eyes, in the sounds that fill our ears, and in the air that fills our lungs.
The thin gold shaving of the moon floating slowly downwards had lost itself on the darkened surface of the waters, and the eternity beyond the sky seemed to come down nearer to the earth, with the augmented glitter of the stars, with the more profound sombreness in the lustre of the half-transparent dome covering the flat disc of an opaque sea. The ship moved so smoothly that her onward motion was imperceptible to the senses of men, as though she had been a crowded planet speeding through the dark spaces of ether behind the swarm of suns, in the appalling and calm solitudes awaiting the breath of future creations. โHot is no name for it down below,โ said a voice.
Jim smiled without looking round. The skipper presented an unmoved breadth of back: it was the renegadeโs trick to appear pointedly unaware of your existence unless it suited his purpose to turn at you with a devouring glare before he let loose a torrent of foamy, abusive jargon that came like a gush from a sewer. Now he emitted only a sulky grunt; the second engineer at the head of the bridge-ladder, kneading with damp palms a dirty sweat-rag, unabashed, continued the tale of his complaints. The sailors had a good time of it up here, and what was the use of them in the world he would be blowed if he could see. The poor devils of engineers had to get the ship along anyhow, and they could very well do the rest too; by gosh theyโ โโShut up!โ growled the German stolidly. โOh yes! Shut upโ โand when anything goes wrong you fly to us, donโt you?โ went on the other. He was more than half cooked, he expected; but anyway, now, he did not mind how much he sinned, because these last three days he had passed through a fine course of training for the place where the bad boys go when they dieโ โbโgosh, he hadโ โbesides being made jolly well deaf by the blasted racket below. The durned, compound, surface-condensing, rotten scrapheap rattled and banged down there like an old deck-winch, only more so;
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