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Tristram Shandy's Reviews > The Secret Sharer

The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad

The Secret Sharer
by

18181298

“All these people had been together for eighteen months or so, and my position was that of the only stranger on board. I mention this because it has some bearing on what is to follow. [… A]nd if all the truth must be told, I was somewhat of a stranger to myself.”

Joseph Conrad’s short story The Secret Sharer, which he wrote in 1909, already casts a spell on the reader through its mysteriously ambivalent title: What exactly is a “secret sharer”, an expression that seems to fly on batlike wings through whisperings in darkness … somebody who shares a secret of mine? Or somebody who secretly, maybe unbeknownst to me, shares something that belongs to me – my house, my toothbrush, my soul?

The first-person narrator, who is a captain on his first command and who knows neither his new ship nor her crew at all, comes across a stowaway, a First Mate named Leggatt, who tells him that he has fled from the Sephora, another ship anchoring nearby, because he has accidentally killed a sailor. Our narrator decides to help his new acquaintance and hides him in his cabin. As time goes by, the pressure on the captain grows and grows because there is always the chance of his steward or somebody else of the crew discovering “the secret sharer”, and consequently the captain’s behaviour is becoming more and more odd in the eyes of his crew. Therefore, Leggatt urges the captain to maroon him on one of the islands on the Cambodian coast. The captain agrees, steering his ship into shallow and unpredictable waters in the enterprise.

”[…] but I wondered how far I should turn out faithful to that ideal conception of one’s own personality every man sets up for himself secretly.”

Like the better-known novella The Shadow-Line, The Secret Sharer has as a protagonist a young man, who enters on his first command at sea and who is consequently insecure and prone to doubting his own success. The Secret Sharer, unlike The Shadow-Line, does not give us any precise information as to how the protagonist managed to obtain his post – it may be through merit and a good reputation, but for all we know the protagonist might also have been somebody’s blue-eyed boy. Among his first decisions on board the ship, on arriving he takes on himself the night watch, because he wants to give the men some rest – however, as keeping watch at night is a most unusual thing for a captain, the men start wondering about him even at that early moment, something that makes him ask himself ”whether it was wise ever to interfere with the established routine of duties even from the kindest of motives.” And yet, this sympathetic but odd decision should lead the new captain into making the discovery of Leggatt and into showing his sympathy in a way triggering even odder decisions and risking to ruin his reputation at the very start of his career.

”I was constantly watching myself, my secret self, as dependent on my actions as my own personality, sleeping in that bed, behind that door which faced me as I sat at the head of the table. It was very much like being mad, only it was worse because one was aware of it.”

What makes the story strange and mysterious – apart from the captain’s readiness, bordering on gullibility, to risk the ship’s safety, and his own, in his enterprise to give a hand in Leggatt’s escape, although he does not know the man – is that the captain soon comes to regard his accomplice in secrecy as a doppelgänger, as his ”grey ghost” and ”the secret sharer of my life”. Why this stark degree of identification with someone he has to keep in hiding from everyone else? Is Laggett, the man tainted by a charge of murder, a stand-in for everything the captain thinks he has to conceal from the men around him in order not to forfeit their respect? Is there a shameful truth in his own life, maybe in the way he obtained his command? At the same time, for all the similarities the narrator discovers in himself and Laggett, he also points out that “the secret sharer” always has the edge on him in sundry ways, for example when it comes to determination and to cold-bloodedness in making a plan and carrying it through. Ironically, in clandestinely harbouring “the secret sharer” in his cabin and in exposing himself to discovery and ensuing shame, the captain not only commits actions that estrange the crew from him – simply because they make him appear whimsical and insecure – but he eventually manoeuvres himself into a situation in which he can show what stuff he is made of and that he has the makings of a reliable captain in himself.

”And I was alone with her. Nothing! no one in the world should stand now between us, throwing a shadow on the way of silent knowledge and mute affection, the perfect communion of a seaman with his first command.”

Not surprisingly, after enabling his mysterious stowaway to get ashore on one of the islands, the captain feels that the spell estranging him from ship and crew is broken and that his mettle has been successfully tested. As in The Shadow-Line, our protagonist has to pass the test of dire circumstances in order to be considered worthy of his command, but one major difference between the two tales is that in the 1916 novella, the nameless narrator is supported by the ship’s cook and some of the malaria-stricken men who are still able to keep themselves on their feet when a storm has to be mastered, whereas in The Secret Sharer the narrator has to fend for himself – with some slight assistance from the man who caused his problems. Another dissimilarity is that here the crew seem to distrust their new captain, who indeed acts in mysterious ways, and the captain has to convince them of his skill, whereas in The Shadow-Line the captain is actually surprised by the trust the crew members have in him in situations when push comes to shove.

The narrator and his overall situation in The Secret Sharer may not be as much fleshed out as in The Shadow-Line, but this adds to the mystery and dreamlikeness which are characteristic of this tale. Of course, the best thing is probably to read both these yarns in conjunction.

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Reading Progress

March 20, 2021 –Started Reading

March 21, 2021 –Finished Reading

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