Heroism in Lord Jim

Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim is a novel bookended by two deaths. In the beginning of the novel, Jim is able to save his own skin by abandoning the passengers on the Patna and escaping with the other crew members when it is erroneously believed that the ship is about to sink. Their actions are effective in the short-term in terms of securing Jim's safety even though the members of the crew are in flagrant disregard of virtually every established ethical system regarding how seamen are supposed to behave.

When it is later revealed that Jim and the crew were misguided about the likelihood of the ship's failure and the Patna sails safely to shore, Jim's self-interested actions are revealed. Although understandable to some degree, Jim's actions are in violation of the personal code he has set for himself at the beginning of the novel. Jim wants to be a hero and respected by others. His flight underlines the fact that he is an ordinary man and this incident dogs him in all of his subsequent positions.

By leaving the Patna, Jim wins his life but loses his honor and the rest of the actions of the novel involve Jim's attempts to redeem himself in the eyes of society but more importantly in his own self-esteem. Jim is only able become the man he wishes to become by dying at the end of the work, where he seems to willingly sacrifice himself in retribution for the death of his friend's son.

Through this action, Jim attains a kind of glory: "But we can see him, an obscure conqueror of fame, tearing himself out of the arms of a jealous love at the sign, at the call of his exalted egoism. He goes away from a living woman to celebrate his pitiless wedding with a shadowy ideal of conduct. Is he satisfied -- quite, now, I wonder?" (Chapter 45). From the arms of the native woman he loves to death, Jim finally becomes the noble creature he aspired to at the novel's inception.

The concept of honor in the novel is also given a clearly racial tinge to it: the civilian passengers who are sacrificed on the Patna are Muslims and the community which Jim finally becomes a part of and establishes authority over at the end of the novel are non-white. It is clear that the reason that the Muslim pilgrims making the hajj are so readily sacrificed because they are regarded by the European captain as inferiors or 'less worthy' than the white individuals steering the ship.

Jim seems to redeem himself as well by loving a native woman and becoming a fixture in a native tribe, where he is finally able to cast of his European identity and become 'Lord Jim' in their eyes.

Jim himself is not said to be moral or immoral, rather at the beginning of the novel he is an ambivalent figure, simply doing what he is told as a seaman: "This has nothing to do with Jim, directly; only he was outwardly so typical of that good, stupid kind we like to feel marching right and left of us in life, of the kind that is not disturbed by the vagaries of intelligence and the perversions of -- of nerves, let us say" (Chapter 5).

The real 'brains' behind the abandonment of the passengers are never brought to trial and Jim becomes.