A young officer aboard a pilgrim ship in Eastern waters abandons his post in a moment of panic, leaping into a lifeboat while eight hundred passengers sleep below, and spends the rest of his life trying to outrun that single act of shame. The story is given to Marlow, who narrates in fragments, gathering testimony from witnesses scattered across ports and verandas, assembling a portrait of a man whose romantic self-image cannot survive the truth of his own cowardice. Jim finds a remote trading post where he can remake himself, but the past follows him like a current beneath the hull. The novel is relentless in its insistence that one moment of failure can become the only story a life ever tells.