More on Lord Jim
This comment is mainly from Joseph Conrad’s “Author’s Note” to his novel. He said it started as a short story, but in the tradition of men “swapping yarns” late at night, it expanded into a full novel. Conrad had been a commercial sailor, and the men on ships must have told each other stories to relieve the boredom. He speaks jokingly of “a glass of mineral water of some sort to help the narrator on.”
On the distinction between a short story and a novel, at least one critic has called Joyce’s novel Ulysses an extended short story because it only deals with one day’s events, and another critic says the novel shows that “a single day can be an epic.” The Coors have a song called “In One Day,” and the Ancient Greek dramatic structural unities held that immediate events of drama should only transpire within 24 hours as in Oedipus Rex.
But back to Conrad’s novel about a man trying to escape from past shame… He remarks in his preamble note to the novel that one reader objected to the story being “so morbid.” The title character moves to Southeast Asia to escape a shameful incident, falls in love with a local woman there, gets involved in a familial dispute, and is shot to death. Conrad says the novel is not so much morbid but about “lost honour.” He ends his note with the most famous line of the novel: “He was one of us.”
“Go” by yours truly
“You now have a national criminal record.”
“I prefer that to your condition. I can die with a mostly clear conscience whatever the law says. I don’t know where you will go after death but have a sneaking suspicion because you are complicit with Sadism and blatant dishonesty from your co-workers.”
“I don’t care!”
“Clearly, you do not.”
“You are virtue-signaling.”
“Is there anything else to signal?”