Lord Jim's Mythological Journey

The hero sets forth on a journey to distant lands, away from home, he or she is urged by an inside appeal, that mythologists and archetypal theorists refer to as “the call to adventure,” in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell explains that:
This first stage of the mythological journey—which we have designated the "call to adventure" —signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown. (53)
In Lord Jim, Jim spends some weeks in a hospital in Singapore after being injured by a falling spar, there, the breeze “brought into the bare room the softness of the sky, the languor of the earth, the bewitching breath of the Eastern waters” (15).

The breeze, it seems, stimulates Jim’s desire for adventure. Right after he leaves the hospital, he decides to join a ship, the Patna and start searching for adventure in the Eastern seas. Jim together with Lingard and Marlow are described as people who cannot resist or refuse the call to adventure:
To us, their less tried successors, they appear magnified, not as agents of trade but as instruments of a recorded destiny, pushing out into the unknown in obedience to an inward voice, to an impulse beating in the blood, to a dream of the future. They were wonderful; and it must be owned they were ready for the wonderful. They recorded it complacently in their sufferings, in the aspect of the seas, in the customs of strange nations, in the glory of splendid rulers. (Lord Jim 188)
The Eastern archipelago enchanted Conrad’s protagonists just like it had bewitched him; Robert Hampson notes that this distant corner of the world had “a grip on his imagination from his first novels, Almayer's Folly and An Outcast of the Islands, through to Victory and The Rescue” (44).
For Campbell, the underworld that is a “ fateful region of both treasure and danger may be variously represented: as a distant land, a forest, a kingdom underground, beneath the waves, or above the sky, a secret island, lofty mountaintop, or profound dream state” (48); it is somewhere standing as the complete opposite of home. In Conrad’s Malay novels, there is an implicit comparison drawn between home and these “distant lands”; between Europe and the Malay islands. And these passages are always introduced in the opening chapters of the novels. The process of the setting’s situation is done through building on a set of binary oppositions between an open, enlightened, active and developed Europe and an imprisoning, backward, dark and static Malay world. In Lord Jim, the narrator mentions a rare category of men who are adventurous and who “appeared to live in a crazy maze of plans, hopes, dangers, enterprises, ahead of civilization, in the dark places of the sea”(15).