In this paper, Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim (1900), which is one of his masterpieces, is examined in relation with what has been critically termed as negative capability. In addition to showing how analyzing the phenomenal aspects of that capability helps in supporting and developing the novel's organic unity, emphasis is put on character's steady movement from ignorance to self-destruction by the end of the novel. It is likewise laid on situations where such a capability is put to the question and shown to have none of the advantages earlier assigned to it.
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