Lord Jim

The natives of Patusan in the Far East worship the bold young Englishman by the name of "lord Jim," but he despises himself. Tortured by an act of cowardice and desertion that wrecked his career in the Merchant Service years before and tormented by his ideal of what an officer should be, he has fled from scandal farther and farther East. It is only here in remote Patusan, filling a post given him the the trader Stein, that he at last finds the will to cease sacrificing himself on the altar of conscience. He becomes a part of life again by accepting the "destructive element within himself." And he follows his star to the end---marrying the beautiful half-caste, Jewel, defending Patusan against the evil "Gentleman Brown."

This is a story of dramatic action and psychological penetration, a work which the critic Morton Dauwen Zabel calls an example of Conrad's "central theme...the grip of circumstances that enforce self-discovery and its cognate, the discovery of reality or truth..."