53 pages 1 hour read

Joseph Conrad

Lord Jim

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1900

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Chapters 31-40Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 31 Summary

Jewel wakes Jim in the middle of the night, insisting that he get up and putting his revolver into his hand. She asks if he can face four men with it, and he says that he can.

She lets him know that he is to be ambushed and killed in his sleep and that the assassins are waiting in Cornelius’s storeroom for a signal before attacking him. Jim, now awake and watchful, calls out for Cornelius, who does not respond. Jewel asks Jim to escape to Doramin immediately, but Jim refuses and instead pushes open the storeroom door while the girl attempts to illuminate it by holding a torch into a window from the outside. Finally, after Jim has decided the room is empty, a man rushes him from the dark wielding a kriss. Jim holds his fire until the last moment, then shoots the on-rushing man through the mouth, and he falls at Jim’s feet. He notices another moving figure and is about to shoot him when the man throws away the spear he is wielding and squats down submissively. Jim asks of the man how many more men are in the ambush. He lets Jim know there are two, and those two also emerge and hold out their hands in a submissive position of surrender.