Chapter 21 Summary

The next morning, over breakfast, Stein suggests they send Jim to Patusan, a remote district of a native-ruled state. And so, thus decided, Stein arranges for Jim to go to Patusan, where he would relieve a man named Cornelius of his job as a manager of the trading post for Stein's company.

Chapter 21 Analysis

Cornelius, who will have a greater role to play in this saga yet, is only briefly introduced. Even here though, he is shown to be an offensive, poor specimen of a man. Stein only abided him as a favor to the man's now deceased wife, a Dutch-Malay woman. Although both men had merely wanted to get Jim 'out of the way', to offer him refuge of a sort, through Conrad's technique of shifting back and forward through the timeline of the narrative we see that Jim has gotten on...