"one of us"

Conrad, at the end of his note at the end of the novel, calls Jim "one of us". Marlow himself repeats this phrase throughout his recountings. The immediate reading of this would be to see Jim as a kind of everyman, whose moral dilemmas are somehow universal, and are ours as well. Yet it must be noted that by being "one of us", Jim is not "one of them". He is not one of the prilgrims sleeping below deck on the Patna, nor is he one of the indigenous Malays at Patusan. Jim's socio-cultural affinities are not hence not as universal as we might expect; he is more of an every-European that an everyman.

Conrad does not claim to offer any point of view other than an European one, and we can perhaps blame Conrad for being racist (again) or Orientalist. But Conrad consciously delineates the cultural and linguistic difference between Jim (and Brown) and the Malays. He is, as is Jim and Marlow, sharply aware of the dialectics of Us and Them, of Self and Other. For as much as we try to dissolve the binaries that keep man and man at bay, we will never be able to fully enter the mind of another. Yet in the brief moments of human connection, like when Marlow and Jim make eye contact in the courtroom, where truly universal issues like justice and honour arise, is there "truth disclosed in a moment of illusion", and then might Jim truly become "one of us" - not simply a character, but human in shape and form.