How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
"They were dead! Nothing could save them! There were boats enough for half of them perhaps, but there was no time. No time! No time!" (7.16)
When Jim starts getting at the heart of what happened aboard the Patna, funky things start happening with his tenses. Jim starts jumping forward in time and saying things had already happened before they did. Here he says the passengers were already dead before the boat had even sunk (which, of course, it never did). Jim seems to be justifying his actions here, arguing that the passengers' deaths seemed inevitable, thus outside his control. Are you buying that argument?
Quote #5
"He related facts which I have not forgotten, but at this distance of time I couldn't recall his very words: I only remember that he managed wonderfully to convey the brooding rancor of his mind into the bare recital of events." (9.9)
Marlow has a creepily good memory, but here he admits that it sometimes fails. At first, we take it for granted that he is reciting pages and pages of dialogue from people like Jim and Stein. But this moment pokes holes in our trust of Marlow as a narrator. Are the quotes we get from Jim actually his own words, or Marlow's interpretation of them? Whose memory can we trust?