This remarkable moment, in which the supposedly omniscient narrator breaks into
the first person, is one of the keys to the novel. It is the literary expression
of the principle of inescapable subjectivity. Just as Conrad has shown each individual
character to be error-prone and internally isolated by his own dream-ideal, so
now the same limits are applied to the narrator, stripping from the reader the
last vestige of objective truth. And indeed, the novel's inconsistent chronology
reveals the narrator to be, in some respects, as hopelessly confused as the characters.