And Jim could have easily asked for forgiveness, too - his father, a parson, seemed a very thin analogy with God himself, a God who will forgive if only you truly believe in him, but Jim couldn't even forgive himself for the missed chance and for how he ruined his life. Ultimately, for me, the novel was about chances, specifically the chances that are missed in life the missed chances we always remember and can never let go of and forgive ourselves for. Conrad gives us something infinitely better than an anatomically perfect recreation of a man who, for all the reasons and complexities that make a person a person, fails in his honor and shipwrecks his future - we get 'the exact description of the form of a cloud' - a cloud in which we each see something different but is just simply a cloud - just simply us. The nested storytelling, the subtle wordplay, the idea that 'three hundred miles beyond the end of telegraph cables and mail-boat lines, the haggard utilitarian lies of our civilization wither and die, to be replaced by pure exercises of imagination' creates an unreality that speaks to a truth of our own being better than if we were given an exact replica of Jim. Perhaps this is why Conrad chose to not only describe Jim as 'inscrutable' but also to tell the story through Marlow - a story within a story so that Jim, in essence, more easily becomes us ('one of us' and, truly, 'any of us') and Marlow becomes a sort of God who dispassionately watches us folly. This novel would then be a wholly contained circle of doomed fate and circumstance destined to play out the same way over and over, time after time. ' Imagine, for a moment, that it was Brown's sunken schooner which makes its way back to the beginning of the novel and becomes the wreckage that caves in the Patna's bulkhead ('as though the ship had steamed across a narrow belt of vibrating water and of humming air'), thus setting the events in motion all over again.

there are as many shipwrecks as there are men.

The exact description of the form of a cloud

Lord jim de joseph conrad