Lord Jim Youth Quotes

How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)

Quote #4

"This was my first view of Jim. He looked as unconcerned and unapproachable as only the young can look. There he stood, clean-limbed, clean-faced, firm on his feet, as promising a boy as the sun ever shone on; and, looking at him [...] I was as angry as though I had detected him trying to get something out of me by false pretenses. He had no business to look so sound." (5.8)

Marlow performs a great shift in tone while speaking here. He starts off with a glowing description of Jim, but then he shifts to his own emotional response to Jim, the ideal youth who turns out to be totally disappointing, and the tone becomes negative. Marlow's balloon has burst before he even has a chance to inflate it.

Quote #5

"He was a youngster of the sort you like to see about you; of the sort you like to imagine yourself to have been; of the sort whose appearance claims the fellowship of those illusions you had thought gone out, extinct, cold, and which, as if rekindled at the approach of another flame, give a flutter deep deep down somewhere, give a flutter of light [...]." (11.1)

The young "rekindle" old emotions and dreams, memories of Marlow's own youth. The strange thing is, if it's Jim's youth that got him into the Patna mess, then we're not sure why Marlow would want to imagine himself to have been just like him as a youngster.

Quote #6

"Don't you see what I mean by the solidarity of the craft? I was aggrieved against him, as though he had cheated me – me! – of a splendid opportunity to keep up the illusion of my beginnings, as though he had robbed our common life of the last spark of its glamour." (11.13)

Here, as in the previous quote, Marlow uses the word "illusion" to describe his own youth. For Marlow, youth and illusion seem to go hand in hand, and Jim's "disillusioning" actions threaten Marlow's nostalgic memories of his own youth.