"The Secret Sharer" is a short story[1] by Polish-British author Joseph Conrad, originally written in 1909 and first published in two parts in the August and September 1910 editions of Harper's Magazine.
That night, with the crew below deck, he discovers a naked half-submerged figure clinging to a rope ladder: it is the first mate named Leggatt from the Sephora, the only other ship anchored in the bay.
The captain recognizes in Leggatt a youthful “double” of himself: The two men are similar in appearance, personal history and maritime experience and aspirations.
They differ in that Leggatt has had the bad fortune to have been embroiled in a conflict with a troublesome deck hand, ending in a violent confrontation during a typhoon, in which the vessel is almost lost.
[13] “The Secret Sharer” is among the most analyzed of Conrad’s oeuvre, a work that has been “endlessly debated.”[14] Biographer Jocelyn Baines, while acknowledging that “The Secret Sharer” is “undoubtedly one of his best short stories” adds this caveat: “Albert J. Guerard and Douglas Hewitt have claimed for it a position as a key in Conrad’s work and attributed to it a significance which I do not believe that it can hold.
Polemical and highly selective, the average reading of ‘The Secret Sharer’ is easily open to charges of partiality or distortion.”—Literary critic Laurence Graver in Conrad’s Short Fiction (1969)[16] According to Baines “the point of the story”, dramatized through the intimate encounter between the captain and the fugitive first mate Leggatt “is to suggest that the fates of these two men were interchangeable, that it was quite possible for an ordinary, decent, conscientious person to…commit some action that would make him ‘a fugitive and vagabond upon the earth.”[17] Literary critic Joan E. Steiner emphasizes the similarity in the two men’s personal history, careers, physical appearance and moral foundations inviting the young captain “to regard Leggatt as his double…”[18][19] Baines argues that Conrad’s captain is sympathetic to his double: Conrad had no wish to condemn Leggatt but considered him an honorable man who had done something that other honorable men might equally well have done in similar circumstances.
[23]Literary critic Edward W. Said concurs with Gueard’s analysis of “The Secret Sharer” that “Conrad’s basic theme is the conflict between the mariner [captain-narrator] and the outlaw [Leggatt]; between the man who seeks to establish control by finding his place among the hard, infallible objects of external reality and that other, darker figure who immerses himself in the destructive, chaotic jungle within and without.”[24] According to Steiner, the doubling device, though not a Conrad invention, appears as the key image in the narrative.
Rather than the “double” exerting an explicitly creative or degenerate influence on the captain, he serves to reveal that “irrational and the instinctive elements in human nature can be a source of strength as well as weakness, good as well as evil.”[26] Steiner tends to align herself with that of critics Baines and Graver namely, that Leggatt’s effect is “more positive than negative.”[27] Steiner concludes that the departure of Leggatt signals “the re-submergence of the captain’s unconscious and the reintegration of his personality…the narrator has moved, with the assistance of his double, from immature and naive integration…to a more mature reintegration resulting from self-knowledge and self-mastery.”[28] The story was adapted for a segment of the 1952 film Face to Face, and also for a one-act play in 1969 by C. R. (Chuck) Wobbe.