ABSTRACT
Conrad takes from Brooke’s history the exceptional sensitivity with which Brooke treated the natives of Sarawak and endows Jim with the same quality. One of Brooke’s victorian biographers wrote that Brooke’s method was ‘to treat the natives, as far as possible, as equals; not only equals before the law, but in society’. The novel ends with the last vignette of Stein turning back to his butterflies at the end of Marlow’s written narrative, and the reader is thus left to ‘pronounce’ for himself: the reader is the judge and the historian. A strange feature of these chapters is the reticence of Stein: he offered crucial diagnosis and interpretation of Jim’s state of mind. ‘Honour’ is a double concept, referring both to a man’s reputation in the society in which he lives and to his own sense of his inner worth.
