Once again I am struck by the amazing world that was the end of the 1800's; an incomprehensibly large globe with places and people that really were a long way away and very different from "us." I don't get the impression that Conrad ever thought that the world would get any smaller than the one he sailed thru or that he could conceive of a world as small as the one in which we live in; his stories are of people that flee from their civilized world and can actually get to a place of total and complete remoteness.
FYI, both Schomberg and to a large extent Marlow show up in this tail.
Jim becomes master of a native community not unlike Kurtz but unlike Kurtz is a good and benevolent leader and a "romantic" till the end. And Jim is not unlike Axel in "Victory" who isolates himself on a desolate island only to have outside forces intrude and destroy what he has gained.
Jim's simple and seemingly rational decision (under great peer pressure) to save himself and jump from the Patna becomes the Scarlet Letter of his life. Having come from a part of the world where the "rule of law" exists he is held accountable for his actions on the Patna and cannot escape this branding. And so in a world that is unfathomably large poor Jim cannot escape his tormentors no matter how far he travels until he gets to the remote and dinghy island of Patusan.
Conrad posits a situation where there is no way for us (the reader) to be certain what we would have done either. Jim's particular situation was not entirely of his own making however as we see several times over he is a poor judge of character and as a result puts himself into unrecoverable states.
At an early age Jim has fantasies of heroic acts in action but he fails early on in his 1st real chance to be a hero. After the Patna he wishes to return to his old pursuit of greatness but is incapable of shaking the verdict of the court and is tormented by his inability to redeem himself, until he gets to Patusan. His redemption is fairly complete there, they do not know about the Patna and would not believe it anyway. So in fact he does achieve a complete break from his past actions by traveling to the ends of the earth, something far more difficult for us in todays world.
In his unending efforts to help (or eventually rid himself of) Jim, Marlow visits his old friend Stein. Their conversation leeds Marlow to an understanding and a wonderful bit of advise on life:
'"I understand very well. He is romantic."
'He had diagnosed the case for me, and at first I was quite startled to find how simple it was; and indeed our conference resembled so much a medical consultation—Stein, of learned aspect, sitting in an arm-chair before his desk; I, anxious, in another, facing him, but a little to one side—that it seemed natural to ask—
'"What's good for it?"
'He lifted up a long forefinger.
'"There is only one remedy! One thing alone can us from being ourselves cure!" The finger came down on the desk with a smart rap. The case which he had made to look so simple before became if possible still simpler—and altogether hopeless. There was a pause. "Yes," said I, "strictly speaking, the question is not how to get cured, but how to live."
In this enlightening passage Conrad spells out one of the realities of the adventurous life in the late 1800's:
I knew very well he was of those about whom there is no inquiry; I had seen better men go out, disappear, vanish utterly, without provoking a sound of curiosity or sorrow. The spirit of the land, as becomes the ruler of great enterprises, is careless of innumerable lives. Woe to the stragglers! We exist only in so far as we hang together. He had straggled in a way; he had not hung on; but he was aware of it with an intensity that made him touching, just as a man's more intense life makes his death more touching than the death of a tree.
Conrad's world has people whom are unfailingly true on one end and those sunken to absolute evil on the other, and the rest of us in the middle.
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