This first chapter, written in the third-person by an as yet unknown narrator, foreshadows the defining incident of the novel; the desertion of the ship Patna. Exactly what part Jim plays in this we do not as yet know but from the narrator's tone and inference, however, it is clearly something of which he is not proud. So too, it portends of his self-imposed exile, his migratory nature caused as a result of his trying to escape his own past and of the reverence in which he would come to be held… he would be called Lord Jim.
Lord Jim