Jim's Judgement Analysis

Chapter One Judgements of Jim’s Confession

A.The interpretive and ethical judgement of Jim
Firstly, I want to present the definition Phelan gives to those three kinds of judgement. In her thesis Phelan wrote that:
Readers make three main types of narrative judgment, each of which has the potential to overlap with or affect the other two: interpretive judgments about the nature of actions or other elements of the narrative, ethical judgments about the moral value of characters and actions, and aesthetic judgments about the artistic quality of the narrative and of its parts. (324)
In the case of Jim, since the time of the publication of Lord Jim, there are countless researches talking about the judgement of Jim. Some of the critic like Ryan

Don’t you be one...You don’t deserve a better fate..And what do you deserve,’... ‘you that I find skulking here with your mouth full of your responsibility, of innocent lives, of your infernal duty? What do you know more of me than I know of you?
After this interrogations, Brown who “had a satanic gift of finding out the best and the weakest spot in his victims” () shows himself as “a man confronting without dismay ill-luck, censure and disaster”(). Jim and himself bear “common blood, common experience, common guilt of secret knowledge” which was like “a bond of their minds and of their hearts”(). Jim cannot condemn and destroy the outlaw without at the same time condemning himself.
Jim’s idealism covered his eyes and dulled his judgment. And his interpretive judgement is overrrun by his ethical judgement. He does not answer or make any retrot about Brown’s interrogation. Jim does what is suitable for his ethical standard, not what is best for Patusan. Later when he asked Doramin to kill him, he is still following his own ethical standard and leaves Jewel his true love in enternal loneliness and sorrow. This kind of clinging to his own ideal can be viewed as a kind of selfishness. But this kind of negative ethical judgement is not only relieved by Marlow’s narration, which I will talk in next chapter, but also relieved by Jim’s own way of narration. I have mentioned that Jim’s interpretive judgement is overrun by his ethical judgment. There is another example besides Jim’s silence about Brown’s accusation. Before Jim goes to Patusan, when he explains the reason for his first mistake. Marlow described Jim way of expressing in the following