Butterfly and Bulkhead: Chance, Control, Conrad

Abstract

"What a chance missed! My God! What a chance missed"
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900)

Jim's lament has intriguing implications for issues of chance and control in literature, perhaps also for literary history, and certainly for the act of reading itself. This article will explore such implications, from the obivous 'moral identity' of Jim himself to the complex way in which imagination incessantly and ingeniously strives to impose its orders and controls on experience.