Abstract: The protagonist of Conrad’s Lord Jim is a troubled and troubling figure. A sympathetic person, idealistic in his goals, the handsome sailor seems “one of us.” Yet he is profoundly disappointing in his cowardly jump from a ship at a moment of crisis. Like Marlow, the novel’s perplexed narrator, we are oddly haunted by this disillusioning tale. Language may help us here. Conrad learned French before he knew English, but one hardly needs to be fluent to see that “Jim” is an interesting combination of “Je (I)” and “him.” Je’im contracts to J’im , creating a word that says : “I’m him.” I, the reader, can identify with this state of coming so near to beauty and fulfillment that I am together on the edge of an ontological precipice, looking down, vertiginous, at uncertainty in knowing who we are. When the one we would want to be eludes us, we are turned into spectres of ourselves, a double-ghost when we feel derealized within ourselves as the phantom of unreached idealization looms over us .
Gavriel Reisner (2025) studied this question.