Lord Jim is remarkable for its elaborately woven scheme of narration, which is similar in many ways to that of The Good Soldier, a novel written by Conrad's friend and collaborator Ford Madox Ford. The narrative comes to the reader primarily through Marlow, a world-weary sea captain who identifies deeply with Jim's fallibilities. Marlow has complete control over the story, though, and he exercises his power in increasingly complicated ways. Time is broken up: in a single paragraph of narration, Marlow will reference the past, the present, and the future. By manipulating the flow of the narrative, Marlow is able to create juxtapositions and contrasts that highlight particular aspects of the story. He is a master at withholding information: Jim's final fate becomes a matter for discussion eight chapters before the reader learns what that fate actually is. This creates suspense, of course, but it also allows Marlow to shape the reader's eventual reaction when he or she does receive the relevant information. Marlow also offers the reader narrative blocks from a variety of sources, of differing degrees of reliability. Much of the story has come from Jim, but significant sections have come from other characters or have been pieced together by Marlow based on inference. Information is conveyed by letters, midnight conversations, deathbed interviews, forwarded manuscripts, and, most significantly, in the form of a tale told to an audience of listeners. The narrative occasionally breaks to show Marlow telling Jim's story to a group of acquaintances at a much later date. Temporally, this scene of storytelling takes place after Jim's arrival in Patusan but before the arrival of Gentleman Brown and Jim's eventual defeat. Marlow must thus leave the story unfinished for a time. He completes it by sending a manuscript to one member of his audience. This shift from an oral mode of storytelling to a written form of narrative is significant. A storyteller has the power to shape his material to match his audience's response; a writer, on the other hand, who works in solitude, must offer his distant reader a predetermined message.