Commentary on The Secret Sharer Essay

Secret Sharer

Joseph Conrad was a twentieth century Polish novelist. Many people consider him the greatest English novelist in the English language. Even though he was considered one of the greatest English novelists, he could not speak English fluently until he was in his twenties. One thing that influenced Joseph Conrads inspiring literature is his experience in traveling around the world. Conrads literature consists of the different styles of techniques he uses to display his well-recognized work as British literature. Conrad needed a break from his larger novel Under Western Eyes so he started and finished The Secret Sharer. In his short story The Secret Sharer, Joseph Conrad tells about a captain that finds a boy that has escaped from another ship and helps him to safety behind everyones back.

The story starts off with the young captain standing at the back of the ship watching it pull off into the sea. The story of The Secret Sharer takes place at near the Gulf of Siam, at sea. The story is told by a young captain that is nameless all throughout the story. The captain was skeptical about playing such an authoritative role as captain because he really did not even know his crew. He met his crew fourteen days before that so he was unsure about them. He is lacking confidence in his position as captain. This is the Captains first job as the captain of a ship and he feels like he does not belong on his own ship, "my position was that of the only stranger on board...I was somewhat a stranger to myself (Conrad). The main characters in the story are the Captain, Leggatt, Archbold, and Chief Mate. The minor characters are Second Mate, and Archbolds wife. The settings of the story are the Captains cabin, Sephora, the ship that Leggatt runs away from, and the ship that the narrator lives on.

The Captain aids a naked man hanging on the rope ladder on the side of his ship, nearly dead, on his ship who is being wanted for the murder of a seaman on a neighboring vessel. The readers only get the story through the captains point of view, so the readers do not really have a way of knowing what Leggatt is really like. He might be really hardworking, or he may not be; whether he really deserved to kill the sailor on the other ship or not. All we know is that the captain, who from the moment they meet feels like they connect and have a lot in common with the man he calls his double, repeatedly makes excuses for Leggatts behavior in his narrative to us, hides him from the rest of the crew, and toward the end of the story gives the stowaway the hat off his own head when he snuck him back off of the ship. This hat goes far in explaining the relationship of the captain to his strange passenger, and the role of both men in the story as a whole.

The reader soon find out that the captain has been hired to be captain of this vessel very suddenly, and that his selection was as much of a shock to him as it was to the his crew. He had never been on board this ship before; he had never met the seamen or the mates who were serving beneath him. He is also extremely young; he mentions that the second mate is the only person on board younger than he is. The captain clearly feels insecure about his new post. He also feels out of place, both of his mates are individuals he can take to easily, and the rest of the seamen are too far below him on the chain of command. This is why the captain feels that Leggatt has things in common with him because he tell him that he killed the other seaman because the seaman would not respect the authority appointed over him. During a terrible storm, Archbold, the captain of his own ship, the Sephora, was to scared to set the sail in the heavy weather, so Leggatt took over the captains ship and did it for him. A seaman refused to look up to his authority to take over in that manner, and Leggatt hit him. When the sailor got up to fight back, Leggatt chocked him to death. Since then Leggatt had been under house arrest for murder, pending trial when they get back to the shore

In conclusion, Joseph Conrad told about a young captain who saved a murderer from another ship because he felt they had a lot in common. The Captain ends up helping Leggatt off the ship when they get close enough to the shore where he could swim back. The Captain even give Leggatt his own hat, even though it gets lost in the water while he is swimming. In the case of the narrator, he does not have to take over someone elses position and kill to maintain it. To his surprise his crew showed him his respect as captain and no one tried to rob him of his position.