The Secret Sharer Response

At breakfast time, eating nothing myself, I presided with such frigid dignity that the two mates were only too glad to escape from the cabin as soon as decency permitted; and all the time the dual working of my mind distracted me almost to the point of insanity. 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.

I had to shake him for a solid minute, but when at last he opened his eyes it was in the full possession of his senses, with an inquiring look.

“All’s well so far,” I whispered. “Now you must vanish into the bathroom.”

He did so, as noiseless as a ghost, and then I rang for the steward, and facing him boldly, directed him to tidy up my stateroom while I was having my bath—“and be quick about it.” As my tone admitted of no excuses, he said, “Yes, sir,” and ran off to fetch his dustpan and brushes. I took a bath and did most of my dressing, splashing, and whistling softly for the steward’s edification, while the secret sharer of my life stood drawn up bolt upright in that little space, his face looking very sunken in daylight, his eyelids lowered under the stern, dark line of his eyebrows drawn together by a slight frown. (p.265-266)

The Dopplegänger of German Romanticism, endowed with fatal and tragic overtones, is sometimes one’s complement, but is more often the foe with whom we are lured to fight. In Conrad’s The Secret Sharer, the captain does not fight his Leggatt-double for his struggle is internal rather than external. Leggatt doubles, or perhaps completes, that half-selfed captain. If Leggatt is to be that complementary self which the captain longs to incorporate, this fight takes place within the captain himself. It is a secret struggle to recognize one’s self as though looking in a mirror and seeing an identity contrary to the one that should be behind that familiar face. It is a struggle that breaks near to madness. Yet, in that moment of insanity which unlocks that hidden self, a completed self is born in a moment of clarity — as clear as seeing the Sephora’s “mastheads above the ridge as the sun went down” (245).

Up until the Sephora’s crew boards the captain’s ship, Conrad maintains the possibility that Leggatt might be purely imagined. Only the captain is aware of his existence aboard the ship, hidden in the captain’s cabin “behind that door,” as though hidden in his mind. Leggatt is, as the captain claims, his “secret self” who vanishes “as noiseless as a ghost.” He passes beyond the physical and, for the captain, enters a sensually mental world where he may be recognized as a part apart from the captain’s known self.

Coming only two pages from the arrival of the Sephora’s crew, in this passage both captain and Conrad suggest that the “dual working of [his] mind” is in fact Leggatt, who in working on the captain’s mind is approaching madness. The “dual working” of the captain’s mind hints at a hidden insanity, which is all the more probable when one examines his situation aboard the ship — a new captain aboard a ship of strangers with whom he has only limited and impersonal connections. His sole connection aboard the ship is Leggatt.

The connection between the captain and Leggatt evolves from that early moment when he glimpses the Sephora’s masts. For the captain, it is a moment of discovery — an enlightenment accentuated by the backlighting of the setting sun. Light, in the form of a flame mistakenly left lit on deck, gives Leggatt a direction to swim. Naked, Leggatt climbs out of the sea as though he were a child emerging from the womb — he is that late arriving twin. Dressed in the captain’s second sleeping-suit, the captain begins to sense a similarity between himself and Leggatt. Both Conway boys, the captain says, “He appealed to me as if our experiences had been as identical as our clothes” (254). It is what exists beneath the physical appearance that binds them — their experiences, their identity.

“A stranger to the ship” and “somewhat a stranger to himself,” the captain finds more than companionship in Leggatt (245). Certainly, an element of companionship is missing from the captain’s life aboard the ship, but in Leggatt the captain discovers someone like himself that acts on his desires. The “frigid dignity” with which the captain conducts himself is in stark contrast with the impulsiveness of Leggatt, who not only has murdered a man but eventually escapes the isolating life aboard ship. The captain helps free Leggatt as though he could free himself. In fact, the captain twice frees Leggatt — from the sea and then later from the ship as he brings the ship perilously near shore. The bath which the captain takes in this passage seems a recreation of that time Leggatt spent in the water, swimming toward that solitary flame which compelled the captain to go on deck and subsequently discover Leggatt. That the ladder was still down represents a lapse of duty which Leggatt embodies and what perhaps the captain needs to apply to his own self in order to become complete.

But that quest for completion brings the captain destructively close to madness for to give Leggatt his freedom, the captain has to risk his own life and the sanity of his mind. When the captain changes course, bringing the ship near to breaking apart on the rocks, he enacts the symbolic struggle within his mind. He has to take himself into the edges of insanity just like he brings the ship to the edges of destruction. If in fact, the ship had released Leggatt and then crashed killing its crew, perhaps Leggatt could be that archetypically fatal double, for in the captain’s death Leggatt would survive as though he were a surviving replacement. Yet, there may be a symbolic death in The Secret Sharer — that is, the death of the captain’s initial self.

For, from Leggatt, the captain attempts to find that self which lay hidden in his unconscious. When the captain takes this journey, he is also aiding his own enlightenment. That enlightenment has to emerge from a struggle with one’s sanity demonstrates that the answers to one’s self have always existed but may not have been easily accepted. In drawing Leggatt from the sea, he draws out that self from within which has always existed as yet unrealized.

Reference: Chevalier, Jean and Alain Gheerbrant (trans. John Buchanan-Brown). A Dictionary of Symbols. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, Inc. (1994), p. 306.