53 pages • 1 hour read
Lord Jim
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Chapters 41-45Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 41 Summary
Brown and Jim face off on opposites sides of a creek. When Jim asks why Brown and his men have come there, Brown answers they are hungry, then throws the same question back at Jim. He is scornful of Jim’s seeming responsibility in this environment and asks what Jim gets for being there. Jim asks what Brown has done to end up here, but Brown again turns the question on Jim and asks if they have met to tell the stories of their lives. If so, he asks that Jim begin. When Brown relates all this to Marlow, he revels in how he presumably got under Jim’s skin.
Chapter 42 Summary
Marlow describes Brown as a man with a gift for finding the weakest spots in his victims. As such, he portrays himself to Jim as a man simply caught by circumstances. He makes Jim wince when he asks if, in saving oneself in the dark, one really cares how many others go down. Jim takes pity on Brown and offers to let him go free if he will lay down his arms and promise to leave the coast. Brown is unwilling to give up his arms, so Jim tells him Brown will either have a clear road or a clear fight. As Brown walks back towards his camp, Cornelius demands to know why Brown did not just kill Jim as he had suggested. Jim comes back and meets privately with Doramin. After a counsel among many in Doramin’s group, Jim assures a woman concerned about the safety of her sons, who would be involved in the fighting if there were any, that the people will be safe. Jim advises that they let Brown and his men have a clear way back to the sea, but he tells Doramin to call in his son Dain Waris, for Jim will not lead in this.
Chapter 43 Summary
Tamb’ Itam reports being thunderstruck at Jim’s decision. Jim tells Jewel he is going out to take command in the town. Jim sends Tamb’ Itam to tell Dain Waris that Brown and his men are to be allowed to pass back down river toward their ship. Jim has previously sent Cornelius with a note for Brown from Jim, indicating that the men will be given free passage out. Cornelius delivers the note but then stays in Brown’s camp and tells Brown that there is a separate way out that would take Brown near Waris’s camp. Fog shrouds Brown’s boat as he and his men depart, with Cornelius on board and towing Cornelius’s canoe. As the chapter ends, Cornelius takes the tiller from Brown, apparently to guide them through the backwater passage.
Chapter 44 Summary
Brown orders his men to load their guns, promising a chance to get even with those who fired upon them from the river in the initial skirmish. Meanwhile, Tamb’ Itam has reached the camp to deliver Waris the message from Jim that Brown should be allowed to pass. While close watch is kept on that part of the river where Brown’s boat is expected to pass at any moment, Brown lands behind the encampment, and he and his men creep up and then open fire from a direction no one in the camp expects. The camp is caught completely by surprise. Brown’s men release three volleys, and Waris is among those killed in the second. Brown and his men then vanish, and Marlow hears only a story of Brown and two others picked up in a longboat a month later claiming that their schooner has sunk. Brown lives to tell his tale to Marlow. Tamb’ Itam kills Cornelius, then rushes to give the bad news to Jim.
Chapter 45 Summary
Tamb’ Itam first meets Jewel at the fort and gives her the news of Dain Waris’s death, then delivers the news to Jim. Jim first orders Tamb’ Itam to raise a fleet of boats for pursuit, but Tamb’ Itam says it is not safe for him to go out amongst the people, at which point Jim realizes the extent of the calamity. That is the point at which Marlow believes Jim tries to write the letter he abandons. Tamb’ Itam reports much weeping and much anger and tells Jim they must fight from the fort or somehow escape. The girl also insists he fight, but Jim insists he has no life and nothing for which to fight. Dain Waris’s body, covered by a white sheet, is laid at Doramin’s feet while all his men stand by fully armed. A bystander pulls the silver ring off Waris that Jim had sent with his instructions through Tamb’ Itam, prompting a murmur from the crowd, followed by a wail of pain and anger from Doramin. Back at the fort, Jewel again asks Jim if he will fight or flee. He says there is nothing to fight for and no escape. Jewel tries to hold him back, but Jim goes to Doramin and stands before him until Doramin shoots him in the chest with a pistol and kills him.
Chapters 41-45 Analysis
Jim’s confrontation with Brown from opposite sides of the creek gives Brown, despite his malicious intention throughout, a prominent place in the novel as something more than just an antagonist. While he is clearly Jim’s rival, he also functions as an alter ego for Jim in these final chapters. The questions that Jim believes he has avoided—by retreating to Patusan and performing what he believes are great deeds—come pouring back to him when he confronts this sailor turned pirate. When Jim asks Brown what his name is, Brown tells him without hesitation. When Brown then asks “’What’s yours?’” (320), Jim does not answer, careful as he is to disguise his shame in the wake of the Patna. Marlow himself even honors this comparative anonymity, giving Jim the respect he believes a gentleman is due.
Similarly, when Jim asks Brown what has made him come to Patusan, Brown tells him that he comes due to hunger. Then, Brown again calls Jim’s position into question: “And what made you?” (320). Yet again, after claiming that he and his men have come to Patusan only for food, Brown challenges Jim: “And what did you come for? What did you ask for when you came here?” (322). Explaining that he, Brown, has shown up here because he fears prison, Brown then asks of Jim what it was that scared Jim into this “infernal hole” (322). With each ensuing question, the reader knows that Brown is uncovering scars from Jim’s experience on the Patna. Finally, Brown says that when it comes to saving one’s life in the dark, “one didn’t care who else went—three, thirty, three hundred people” (325). Brown unwittingly pricks at the incident that still haunts Jim’s conscience.
Jim’s hesitation to deal directly with Brown as the dangerous threat that he is to the people of Patusan is due to Brown’s ability to make Jim revisit his guilt about the Patna incident. In addition, Brown ironically becomes a messenger for the novel’s critique of The Unfulfilled Promises of Empire. His questions as to what Jim’s actual purposes are in Patusan get to the core of the imperial enterprise: Jim has used this community to escape from his own past, assuming a kind of authority he could never again have within the metropolitan centers. That is, he is not Lord Jim at all; he is merely a failed sailor, the fifth son whose prospects were already limited. The “civilizing mission” is merely a cover for the colonists’ desire to maximize profits and hide their guilt.
Once Jim sees he is in danger of following Dain Waris in death, he still refuses to fight or to leave. The arc of Idealism, Isolation, and Redemption is nearing its end, and Jim sees that he now has the chance to do what he failed to do on the Patna: to take responsibility for the lives that have been entrusted to him. In Patusan, Jim has already assured the people that everyone will be safe, and he has said that he is willing to answer “with his life for any harm that should come to them” if Brown and his men are allowed to leave (330). In appearing before Doramin to meet his fate, Jim achieves a kind of belated redemption.
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