Heart of Darkness and Selected Short Fic - Joseph Conrad [13]
The story begins with the narrator wondering at the outset of his first voyage as a captain whether he “should turn out faithful to that ideal conception of one’s own personality every man sets up for himself secretly” (p. 155). As it happens, the ensuing circumstances will provide the opportunity for an investigation of that very question, although the terms of the investigation will be considerably more complex and ambiguous than he can anticipate. The plot that subsequently unfolds is loosely based on the circumstances surrounding a famous episode of violence at sea. In 1880, on a sailing vessel off the coast of South Africa, a white first mate racially taunted and then killed a black crewman during an altercation between them. Several days later the captain secretly allowed the mate to escape, leading the crew nearly to a state of mutiny. The anguished captain subsequently committed suicide, by drowning himself, and the mate was eventually caught and convicted of man-slaughter. In Conrad’s version of the story, which is set in the Gulf of Siam and elides the race issue, it is without the complicity of his captain that the mate (here named Leggatt) escapes imprisonment on his ship. He swims to a nearby vessel, where he is taken in by the narrator, and much of the story is occupied with detailing the uncomfortable, and often comic, circumstances surrounding the latter’s efforts to keep the presence of his stowaway secret. Having successfully hidden Leggatt not only from his own crew but also from the captain and crew of the ship from which the errant mate has escaped, the narrator concludes his tale by describing how he has taken his ship on a dangerous nighttime maneuver in order to bring it close to shore in an effort to enable Leggatt to swim to safety.
Although “The Secret Sharer” has inspired a wide variety of interpretations, including political, sociological, and historical ones, by far the greatest interest in the story has been in its rich suggestiveness as a psychological tale. It has, accordingly, been subjected to a barrage of psychoanalytic interpretations. While Conrad maintained that he had no interest in the theories of Sigmund Freud, he was nonetheless intrigued by the complex duality of human consciousness, and this tale clearly reflects that interest. Throughout the story the narrator emphasizes his uncanny sense of identity with Leggatt—he characterizes the fugitive as his “other self,” his “double,” and his “secret sharer”; and he goes on to say of the duplicity necessitated by his efforts to keep Leggatt hidden, “the dual working of my mind distracted me almost to the point of insanity. I was constantly watching myself, my secret self.... It was very much like being mad, only it was worse because one was aware of it” (p. 170). In this respect the story, which Conrad had considered titling “The Second Self,” “The Secret Self,” and “The Other Self,” participates in the motifs of the Doppelgänger literary tradition, of which Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) is a particularly influential example.
Some of the most interesting interpretive possibilities for the story, in fact, are based on the assumption that the young captain’s intense identification with his alter ego may render his judgment, and perhaps even his veracity, suspect. Indeed, the confidence with which he claims that he understands the circumstances of the killing and how to interpret them (based solely on Leggatt’s own exculpatory version of the events) is remarkable for the uncritical frame of mind it discloses: “I knew well enough... that my double