The Secret Sharer de Joseph Conrad

The Secret Sharer

Joseph Conrad

The Secret Sharer takes place at sea, near the Gulf of Siam, told from the perspective of a young nameless Captain. The captain is unfamiliar with both his ship and his crew, having only joined their company a fortnight earlier. The Captain is furthermore unsure of himself, questioning his ability to fulfil the role of such an authoritative figure.

While on look-out duty one night, the captain encounters a naked swimmer holding onto the side ladder of the ship. He helps the mysterious swimmer onto the boat and hides him in his cabin without the rest of the crew's knowledge. He then learns of the mysterious swimmer's past. His name is Leggatt, and he swam away from a nearby ship, called the Sephora, where, as chief mate, he killed another crew member for insolence during a storm.

The captain keeps Leggatt hidden in his quarters, away from the suspicious crew members and a visit from the skipper of the Sephora. Eventually the Captain allows Leggatt to escape by bringing the ship perilously close to land for Leggatt to swim away safely, though this risky sailing manoeuvre nearly sends the ship into the rocks, testing the Captain's seamanship. He succeeds and leads the ship away.

The Secret Sharer was published in 1910 based in part on a true story: In the 1880s, a mate aboard the Cutty Sark killed an insubordinate sailor during an altercation.

"The Secret Sharer" seems to be an old-fashioned tale of adventure on the sea. The story features a captain, his crew, a mysterious event, a murder, a near-disaster, and the saving of a ship. While "The Secret Sharer" is an adventure yarn, it also stands as a profound and often disquieting examination of every person's dual nature and how each person must resolve this duality in order to grow. Conrad's use of the doppelganger theme allows him to explore the dual nature of his protagonist, a young yet unsure captain assuming his first command.

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Joseph Conrad (3 December 1857 - 3 August 1924) was a Polish-British writer regarded as one of the greatest novelists to write in the English language. Though he did not speak English fluently until his twenties, he was a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature Conrad wrote stories and novels, many with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst of what he saw as an impassive, inscrutable universe Conrad is considered an early modernist, though his works contain elements of 19th-century realism. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced numerous authors, and many films have been adapted from, or inspired by, his works. Numerous writers and critics have commented that Conrad's fictional works, written largely in the first two decades of the 20th century, seem to have anticipated later world events. Writing near the peak of the British Empire, Conrad drew, among other things, on his native Poland's national experiences and on his own experiences in the French and British merchant navies, to create short stories and novels that reflect aspects of a European-dominated world-including imperialism and colonialism-and that profoundly explore the human psyche.