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Summary and Analysis of Part I
Summary The story begins on a nameless ship, anchored at the mouth of the River Meinam in the Gulf of Siam. The narrator, a nameless young captain who has only been in charge of the ship for a fortnight, stands onboard his ship, gazing off the side of the vessel. On the left, the captain sees a cluster of rocky islets and on his right, two clumps of tress mark the river's mouth and puffs of smoke show the path of the tug ship that recently guided the ship down the river. The captain watches, almost regretfully, as the tug ship leaves him alone on his ship in the middle of complete silence, "an immense stillness." While he is alone on board, the captain sees another ship in the distance, something that he is extremely surprised to encounter. The sun sets and the captain descends to his quarters, along with his mates. While eating dinner, he mentions seeing the ship off of the coast. The chief mate begins to speculate on how the boat came to be there, his conclusion being that she was a ship from home lately arrived. The second mate, however, interrupts and says that the ship's name is Sephora and she carries coal. He learned this information from the tugboat skipper, when he came onboard the ship to deliver mail. Throughout the whole conversation, the captain emphasizes to the reader that he was both " a stranger to the ship" and "a stranger to myself." As the crew begins to leave, the captain directs the chief mate to let all "hands turn in without setting an anchor watch." Instead, because the men were tired and had been working hard, the captain himself would take the anchor watch. While unusual and the men are surprised, they go to bed leaving the captain alone with his thoughts. He is worried because he is on a "ship of which I knew nothing, manned by men of whom I knew very little more." While he is smoking a cigar, in his nightclothes, the captain realizes that a rope ladder is still hanging down one side of the ship. Realizing that it is his fault because he told the men to abandon the watch, the captain tries to reel the ladder in but is met with more resistance than he expected. Looking over the side of the ship, he sees what he thinks is a headless corpse attached to the ladder. Frightened, he looks further and realizes that the body is not dead, nor headless, and the captain yells at him, "What's the matter?" The man answers, "Cramp" and then says, "no need to call anyone except for the captain." The captain answers that the man is in luck, he is the captain of the ship and as the man climbs aboard the ship he introduces himself as Leggatt and the captain leaves to retrieve some clothes for the man. As the man dresses, the captain observes that he is a young man, probably not more than 25 years old. Leggatt reveals that he was a mate on the Sephora but that he killed a man, although he justifies that the man was very evil. Realizing that the are both Conway boys, Leggatt confesses that his father is a parson and he could never stand trial for what he had done. As he tells his story, the captain is surprised because the man "appealed to him as if our experiences had been as identical as our clothes." Moreover, the captain "knew well enough also that my double was no homicidal ruffian." Although the captain did not ask for the details of the crime, Leggatt begins to recount his story. On a dark and stormy night, while the men on board were setting a reefed foresail, a crazed Leggatt "felled him like an ox." After a brutal struggle, Leggatt managed to strangle the man to death. Because of the murder, the captain relieved him as his duties of an officer, imprisoned him in his cabin (for over six weeks) and was preparing to take him to trial when the ship landed. Without any statement regarding his story, the captain merely tells the man that he should slip down to his stateroom. After going to the stateroom, the captain calls for his second mate to take over the watch. Entering his stateroom, the captain explains to the reader that his room was in the shape of an L, the door being within the angle and opening into the short part of the letter. Anyone opening the door had no view of the long part of the letter, the majority of the room, a significant advantage given the "recent arrival." Walking into his room, the captain, speaking extremely quietly, inquires on how the man came to hang on the side ladder of his ship. Leggatt explains that about three weeks ago, he asked to speak to the captain and kindly requested that he leave the door of his cabin unlocked when they could see land, in order that he could make a break swimming for it. The captain, however, refused, a man that was afraid of both the men on the ship and his second mate. The wife of the captain is also onboard the Sephora. The night before, however, the steward left the door open after bringing him his supper. Leaving his room and walking on the deck, Leggatt through off his shoes and dived overboard. Hearing the splash, the rest of the crew came running and tried to search for him in the water but they were unable to find him. Seeing the light of the ship in the distance, he swam desperately for it because the islets (where he originally landed and disposed of his clothes), offered no escape, no water, and no food. On his last leg and about to drown, he was surprised but extremely grateful to find the ladder down because he was not capable of swimming as far as the rudder around the other side of the boat. Warning the captain that he thinks the Sephora's captain will come to the ship and look for him, the captain puts Leggatt into his own bed. Drifting into his own thoughts, focusing on his double, the captain falls asleep and before he realizes it, the steward is knocking on his door bringing him his morning coffee. The captain acts strangely, but the steward leaves without searching the cabin. The captain proceeds to go above deck and orders the men to "Square the yards by lifts and braces before the hands go to breakfast," his first real order while he has been aboard the ship. After presiding over breakfast very harshly, the captain returned to his room and wakes up his "secret self" and instructs him to vanish into the bathroom. While he is in the bathroom, the captain instructs the steward to clean his room while he is having his bath. The steward follows the orders and cleans the room while the captain bathes and Leggatt stands straight up, still in the bathroom. After the steward leaves, the captain lets the second mate get a good look at the cabin and then closes the door. He sits and his desk, "his secret self" in front of him, hidden from the door, but they do not speak, as it is not safe during the daytime and the captain "could not have stood the excitement of that queer sense of whispering to myself." At the conclusion of the chapter, a voice yells, "there's a ship's boat coming our way, sir." The captain yells "All right. Get the ladder over" and, hesitating, went on deck without saying a word to Leggatt. AnalysisA major theme that Conrad explores in the Secret Sharer is the relationship between the land and sea, elements that he also compares other places in his writing. On one hand, Conrad rejoices in the great beauty, serenity, and immensity of the sea, compared with the squalor, anxiety, and unrest of the land. Yet, from the land come the energies, some of them evil, which give meaning to the climate of the sea. Geographical duality ultimately gives shape to the duality of the self. In this train of thought, "The Secret Sharer" begins with a beautiful view of the sea and shore, and than progresses to other dualities, psychological and political, that the captain must both experience and comprehend. In the first paragraph of the story, the captain looks at the flat shore joined to the stable sea." It is significant that in the opening images the captain can scarcely discern where one element begins and the other ends. He himself is at a faintly discerned dividing line between immaturity and maturity; between landsman and seaman. A duality also exists aboard ship, for our new captain, not yet at ease about his ship, or about himself, prepares for his first cruise under the watchful eyes of a skeptical crew. His officers were all accustomed to the ship and to each other; they knew their roles. The captain was a stranger to the ship and a stranger to himself. "The Secret Sharer" is also a story concerning the obstacles to be overcome in the process of maturation, or in becoming "good enough" to those around here. For the captain, his inadequacies concern his lack of confidence in his own capabilities, a fear of inadequacy, and a fear of ultimate failure. Even before we meet his double, a motif that obviously addresses these inadequacies, Conrad lays the scene, again emphasized by the important physical description that begins the book. The captain sees, "two small clumps of tress, one on each side of the only fault in the impeccable joint, marked the mouth of the River Meinam we had just leftand, far back on the inland level, a larger and loftier mass, the grove surrounding the great Paknam pagoda, was the only thing on which the eye could rest form the vain task of exploring the monotonous sweep of the horizon" The insignificant twin clumps of tress observed by the captain suggest the dyadic aspects of the captain's personality, which Conrad develops fully in the double motif. The captain's youthful lack of confidence in himself and his abilities, and his fearsome awe of his ship are presented explicitly and implicitly. The most obvious manifestation of his insecurity is his decision to stand the anchor watch himself, a task not usually assumed by a chief mate, to say nothing of a captain. It is of this feeling of inadequacy, this split between what he knew he should become and what he feared he was, that the captain must rid himself. Having progressed beyond this initial immature state, he would have attained the higher ground of self-knowledge, symbolized by the "larger and loftier mass, the grove surrounding the great Paknam pagoda," standing on higher ground than that on which the "two insignificant clumps of trees stand," one on each side of the only fault in the "impeccable joint" of land and sea. One of the important, but subtle, symbols within this chapter is the scorpion that the chief mate finds in his cabin. In the story, the mysterious creature causes the mate much speculation as why it chose his particular cabin and drowned itself in his inkwell. As the story progresses, the same questions can be applied to Leggatt, as the scorpion in the mate's cabin and Leggatt in the Captain's cabin have one similar aspect in common - they are extremely dangerous. The dramatic progression in the book, however, begins when Leggatt first comes aboard, a progression which moves from the menace of invaded privacy in the captain's cabin, to the menace of discovery of this dual self by the ship, then to the stress of possible discovery by another captain, and finally, the menace of the unknown self as the captain exercises his newly won command. It is important to note that the captain does not consciously decide to conceal the fugitive - there is no debate in the action that will cause him considerable grief on the ship. As soon as he sees the stranger, he reflects later: "A mysterious communication was established already between us twoin the fact of that silent, darkened tropical sea." Leggatt speaks of him as talking to him quietly - "as if you had expected me." The closeness of this mysterious communication is emphasized from the very beginning of their relationship, first beginning with their clothes. Another interesting aspect of the narrative regards the fact that the reader, nor the captain, is not concerned with the precise nature of Leggatt's offense, for there is no indication that the captain feels any shadow of guilt specifically because the man he is hiding is a murderer. Leggatt is an embodiment of his original feeling of being a stranger' to himself, of that fear that there are parts of himself which he has not yet brought into the light of day and that these aspects of his personality may interfere with that ideal conception of one's own personality every man sets up for himself secretly.' What disturbs him is that there is a secret sharer at all; for he brings to light his own suspected insecurity. Moreover, it is important that the man who helps a fugitive from the law is himself an officer of the law, having just been appointed captain of a ship, his first command. The story, therefore, also becomes one of the consequences and duties of class and authority. Why does the captain conceal the criminal? Perhaps because the captain realizes that the crime that Leggatt committed was a crime that in similar circumstances he himself might have committed. The murderer and the captain had held identical jobs as mates on separate ships until a few weeks previous to Leggatt's criminal act and the captain's promotion to his first command. The captain realizes that instead of becoming a member of the ruling class on the high seas he easily might, like Leggatt, have deviated into the class of the hunted outlaw. He therefore identifies himself with the murderer rather than with the judges who would condemn Leggatt should he be brought before them in a court of law. There is, however, in Leggatt, a feeling of guilt, the knowledge that he has transgressed against the code of society. He can speak of the man he has killed as one of the miserable devil that have no business to live at all,' but he is prepared to accept the brand of Cain" business.' I was ready enough,' he says, to go off wandering on the face of the earth." After the mysterious stranger comes on deck, it is significant that the captain fetches a suit of his pajamas for the naked swimmer. Dressed, the two are doubles in appearance. They are identical in height and weight, and have the same dark hair - they are even both Conway boys. The one difference, however, is that Leggett has killed a man aboard his ship, the Sephora. He, therefore, is a fugitive, but a resolute fugitive because he claims justice in his action. He tells the story of a storm, of a command insolently disobeyed, and his righteous rage that resulted in the death of the malcreant but in the saving of the ship. As the young skipper listens to Leggatt, he is convinced of the absolute rightness of that action and knows that he would like to have done the same. The fugitive seems his double in life crises as well; only he has already met his trial, has acted in those matters that decide whether a man shall "turn out faithful to that ideal conception of one's own personality every man sets up for himself secretly." Indeed, the idea of the double is firmly implanted within the narrative itself - Leggatt is described as his double' or his other self' more than twenty times in the course of the story. Leggatt swum for the light, but even before he reached his destination he resolved to swim until he sank rather than be downed by his bigoted and hostile superior officers aboard the Sephora. There he was, like his double, a young officer newly aboard, hated because he had come in over men who considered themselves in line for the promotion; a stranger to the ship and to her officers - but not to himself. The last quality is the thing that he will eventually convey to his secret sharer. The remainder of the first part of the story established the social and political tension of concealing the double self from the ship's personnel. The routine of the steward must be charted; the captain's cabin becomes a place of stealth and deception as the skipper hides his alter ego. Orders for the command of the ship must be given, yet 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." In the first chapter, it is also important to note that in this story there are very few details or characters that are not essential to the allegory that Joseph Conrad is attempting to paint. The analysis of this chapter can be so long because every sentence is geared towards the major point of the story, something that is far from this author's previous works. One of the key literary elements of this story is also the universal quality of the message that Joseph Conrad attempts to deliver. Having the ship, the captain, and everyone aboard that ship remain nameless emphasizes the universality and applicability of the story. The captain can represent every man, and the ship, every man's journey through life.
Summary and Analysis of Part II
Summary The second part of the book begins with the captain of the Sephora, Captain Archbold, coming aboard. The narrator describes the other skipper as having thin red whiskers, and being almost afraid of what he was requesting. Refusing the captain's offer of liquor, he accepts water and tells the captain "it's been tiring work - searching the islands around my ship." Politely and inquisitively, the captain inquires why. The other skipper answers him, but in a muted voice and in order for his double to hear every word, the captain of the nameless ship tells his visitor that he is hard of hearing. After Captain Archbold recounts the details of the murder, the captain tries to justify the action, claiming that maybe the sea killed the man. In response, Captain Archbold sticks his tongue out at his host and claimed that if he had seen the sight, he would never forget it as long as he lived. Trying to justify his doubles action, the captain volunteers "that reefed foresail save you." While the opposing captain concedes this, he also claims that it was not Leggatt's work but God's hand that helped him put the sail in the morning. Trying once more, from a different angle, the captain volunteers that "you were very anxious to give up your mate to the shore people, I believe?" Indeed, Captain Archbold claimed, he was, to the law, after 37 virtuous years at sea he had some obligation. The captain then volunteers even more information, that he was not responsible for engaging the murderer and he never did like him. The captain then concedes that he must report a suicide, because there is no possible that the man could have reached land. From this point, Captain Archbold increased his questioning, pointing out that it was only approximately a two mile swim to the captain's boat. At this point in the two men's conversation, the captain takes Captain Archbold on a detailed search of the ship, staring with the bathroom and including every room on board. Disappointed, the captain leaves the ship and as he is going down the same ladder that Laggard ascended he stops, questions again, but then returns to his own ship. After he leaves, the mates tell the captain that they have heard of the horrid affair, it is worse than things they hear happen on Yankee ships. With the conclusion of this conversation, the captain realizes that he can confide in no one on his ship. Before the captain can find out much more from the stranger, a mate comes to tell him that there is enough wind for the ship to set sail. Excitedly, the captain rushes upstairs and launches the boat. From there, during the sail there were certain scares on board. One day, the steward was surprised to see the captain near the pantry because he was sure that he had just heard him in his cabin. For the most part, the "double" stayed in the captain's bathroom, dressed in the gray sleeping suit, for the majority of the day, because the two determined that this was the safest place. Discovery, however, hung like "swords above their heads" at all times, the biggest threat being the steward. One day, the steward went to the captain's room to hang up his coat in the bathroom. The captain, naturally, is terrified of the steward's discovering the secret man in his quarters but because Leggatt was able to duck far enough into the bath tub to escape detection. After this close call, approximately the fourth day the man had been on board, the double tells the captain that he must end this and he wishes to be marooned on the islands near the ship. At first, the captain protests him leaving but realizes that this is merely selfish desire to have his double there. In the end, he agrees but he argues that he should not leave until the night after because he will be able to get closer to the land. After settling on this course of events, the double proclaims that it is very nice that someone finally understands him. At midnight, the captain turned the ship around and headed towards land, much to his mate's surprise. As they get closer and closer to the rocky islands, the crew is surprised by the captain's decision but the captain attributes it to trying to take advantage of the land breezes. Finding Koh-ring, what the captain believes to be an inhabited island, he sets the ship to come as close to the island as possible in order to give his double the best chance possible. The captain then orders that the quarter-deck ports be opened, in order to eventually smuggle his secret self into a sail locker, which communicates with the lobby of the boat. In the lobby, there is an opening that connects directly with the quarter-deck and which is never closed in good weather. When the ship is still, Leggatt will have ample opportunity to escape from the port using a rope to lower himself into the water, thereby avoiding a splash. After supper, the captain returns to his quarters nad pronounces it dark enough to begin the plan. Exchanging their last whispers, the captain gives him most of the money he has onboard (only keeping enough to buy fruit and vegetable for the crew from native boats in the Sunda Straits). Telling the steward to retrieve hot water from the galley, the captain buys time for Leggatt to sneak past the stairs and into the sail locker. As the double enters the sail locker, the captain retired his floppy hat from his head and gave it to his other self. The crew is extremely worried as the captain tries to get the ship as close as possible to land. As the captain is trying desperately to keep his ship from sailing too close to the rocks, he seeks something to throw into the water to see which way the ship is moving. Suddenly, he sees something white on the black water, his floppy hat. As the narrator related "And I watched the hat - the expression of my sudden pity for his mere flesh. It has been meant to save his homeless head from the dangers of the sun. And nobeholdit was saving the ship, by serving me for a mark to help[ out the ignorance of my strangeness." In the end, the captain saves the ship and steers he on the proper direction, and he watches his hat, something that marks the place that "a free man, a proud swimmer," begins "striking out for a new destiny." AnalysisAt the beginning of Part II, the theme of duality is once again continued, as menaces continue to plague the captain, his secret sharer, and the ship. The attack from within - the disabling awareness of duality in the captain's cabin, the sanctum of command - is intensified by the invasion from outside the ship. The skipper of the Sephora comes aboard in a suspicious and doubting mood. In this role, he is the dramatic projection of the chief mate of the ship who "liked to account to himself' for any departure from normal ship life. Such a quality menaces the not only the status, but also the sanity, of the captain. Captain Archbold joins the hostile officers aboard and prowls through the ship; even searching the cabin, in vain. His actions, however, are not fruitless but serve to widen the area of stress. The entire ship is now aware of the situation - a larger society has become involved. The third and most insidious menace invades the captain when, after Captain Archbold has been shown off of the ship, the ship begins to move. The awareness of the double in his cabin interferes with the commands he must give in order for the ship to operate safely. His seaman's reflexes desert him and he is self-consciously aware that he has no "feel" for the ship. His secretive habits in the cabin carry overtly to relationships with the crew; he catches himself several times reaching up to the mate to whisper a command, to the mate's utter astonishment. The opening scene of Part II, in which the captain plays host to Archbold with Leggatt hiding a few feet away, also further strengthens loyalties already established. Archbold, skittish and easily out of temper, is a foil to Leggatt and to the captain as well. Throughout the interview, he gives off an air of fussy distraction, and in his most authoritative act sticks out his tongue to imitate the death mask of Leggatt's victim. Archbold's solemnity is contrasted with the playfulness of the captain, who fakes being deaf and happily leads his guest on a futile search of the ship. For a man quick to confess his dislocation, the captain is remarkably self-assured. In a revealing exchange, he catches Archbold distorting his own action during the crisis, claiming more credit than he was due. According the values of the captain, Archbold is clearly the villain of "The Secret Sharer." Personally inadequate against the pressure of the storm, he refuses to admit Leggatt's heroic role and retraces to an unthinking reliance on Providence. Instead of responding flexibly to the exceptional circumstances of the murder, he becomes increasingly more rigid and more mystical. Archbod's failure of imagination, his inability to see that the moment called for charity not intransigence, testifies to the correctness and decency of the captain's response. Clearly, the person of Leggatt is central to the story, and extremely symbolic. In one reading of "The Secret Sharer," Leggatt represents a lawless, subrational side of the self which may lie dormant until some moment of moral stress, and then must somehow be encountered. This is revealed to the reader through many ways. The first point that emphasizes this is Leggatt's utter lack of rationality (contrary to the Captain's descriptions of him as intelligent' and sane'). In his own element, the fishlike Leggatt loses even the appearance of rationality: "With a gasp I saw revealed to my stare a pair of feet, the long legs, a broad livid back immersed right up to the neck in a greenish cadaverous glow . .. He was complete but for the head. A headless corpse!" If Leggatt symbolically lacks a head, as this description and his name imply, then there is little surprise in his finding the narrator's hat useless when at the end of the story he returns to his native element. The notion of subrationality is confirmed by other imagery throughout the short story - not only is Leggatt "fish-like;" he is also like a terrier or its jungle counterpart ("I had him by the throat,'" Leggatt tells the narrator, "'and went on shaking him like a rat'") and a "wild beast." The notion of a regressive animalism, for example, is implied both in Leggatt's unflagging appetite and in his instinctive alertness; "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." His processes of decision are distinctly subrational: "I just took it not my own hands and went away from him, boiling'"; and the narrator formulates a significant distinction in his description of Leggatt's thinking out" his escape from the Sephora: a stubborn if not a steadfast operation." Leggatt himself recognizes the impulsive qualities of his motives: "I strolled out on the quarterdeck. I don't know that I meant to do anything . . .Then a sudden temptation came over me. I kicked off my slippers and was in the water before I had made up my mind fairly." When Leggatt finally makes his departure, he returns to the two archetypal life sources standard in all of Conrad's fiction: the sea, and the heart of darkness (Koh-ring, a "towering fragment of the everlasting night" among islands "unknown to trade, to travel, almost to geography"). There are two or three details within the text that support the above reading of Leggatt as subrational. Leggatt's language, as the narrator descries it, relates him to a deep primitive (such as the finally inarticulate Kurtz in Heart of Darkness): "He told me the story roughly in brusque, disconnected sentences." On his first appearance, Leggatt too, of course, is "mute." This subrational and even subconceptual status explains Leggatt's resistance to the anxiety that grips the narrator; since insanity is by definition a disruption of rationality, Leggatt cannot be susceptible to it; there was "something unyielding in his character," the narrator reports, "there was no agitation in his whisper." Leggatt is "sane" and "intelligent" - or appears so, to the distracted narrator - only because the opposites of these terms have no meaning when applied to him. The subrational interpretation, however, is distinct from saying that Leggatt is merely a "criminal" self and a predominantly negative influence on the captain, something that distorts Leggatt's significance. He demonstrates, as noted above, the irrational or instinctive elements in human nature but they can be a source of strength as well as weakness, good as well as evil. Recognizing this ambiguity, the captain understands how "the same strung-up force which had given twenty-four men a chance, at least, for their lives, had, in a sort of recoil, crushed an unworthy mutinous existence." Leggatt's effect on the captain is similarly ambiguous, but ultimately, probably more positive than negative. In this reading, therefore, in the end, the "Secret Sharer" is a story of integration, rather than conflict and repression. To "subdue" Leggatt would be a mistake; the narrator must instead fuse Leggatt's subrational personality with his own rational and civilized one, to emerge as a conceptually imperfect but effective moral agent. It is not that the Captain cannot be commander of his ship until Leggatt has left it, but rather that until he has made his full and active practical commitment to Leggatt - risked everything to guarantee Leggatt's freedom and survival, instead of his repression - he cannot feel the self-assurance and practical force necessary to command either himself or his ship. In the conclusion of the story, therefore, the Captain fuses his dual nature, and in so doing so makes the destructive part of himself serve his ideal ends. The more common reading of Leggatt, however, is discussed and analyzed in part 1. This theory holds that the presence of Leggatt is nightmarish not because he makes the captain aware of any inadequacy or wrongness in his ideas and beliefs, but rather because the relationship between them is itself an objective correlative so such knowledge. In "The Secret Sharer," unlike in Heart of Darkness, the whole of the narrator's strangeness has been so completely embodied in the person of Leggatt that it can seemingly be gotten rid of. Leggatt can, in fact, be marooned on one of the islands that fringe the Gulf of Siam. But the captain feels that he cannot do this easily, thus representing that he cannot be rid of Leggatt easily. Although he knows that he may be endangering his ship by taking such a risk, he feels that, as he says, "It was now a matter of conscience to have the land as close as possible." Clearly, it is not physical considerations alone which determine this need; Leggatt can obviously swim very well. It seems, rather, that the captain feels that to exorcise his other self he must ran as close to disaster as possible, knowing all the time, as he says that "all my future, the only future for which I was fit, would perhaps go irretrievably to pieces in any mishap to my first command." Thus, finally the narrator and Leggatt are separated; even the hat which the captain thrusts on the fugitive's head falls off in the water and acts as a mark by which he can gauge the progress of the ship. After the captain leaves the ship, but before Leggatt leaves the ship, the self-division within the captain is significant, but not as significant as many critics write. The comic quality of this action is also important to note. The adventures that throw the Captain into fits of nervous anxiety are hardly sinister. He startles the steward who thought he had been below and then sends him around the ship on incomprehensible errands. These actions, far from life and death, almost remind one of a horror movie and not the dreaded actions that the narrator describes. The symbol of the white hat at the end of the book is obviously extremely important and powerful, as alluded to above. The hat itself is a symbol of good, of the captain's pity and mercy for "his other self." The item also represents the physical parting of the two men, who have throughout the story fused into one (even the grammar eventually refers to Leggatt and the captain as one person, and the name Leggatt is used very infrequently throughout the book). The hat was the pinnacle of this language and the captain's identification with his secret self: when he justifies giving the hat to Leggatt he says "I saw myself wandering barefooted, bareheaded, the sun beating on my dark poll. I snatched off my floppy had and tried hurriedly in the dark to ram it on my other self." That he leaves the hat is significant, because it symbolizes the parting between the two. More significantly, and ironically, however, the hat literally points the way to the Captain's successful maneuvering of his ship to a safe place, an act that insures his acceptance and the salvation of himself, his ship, and all those aboard the ship. The implication, then, could be that by pitying our "dark selves," by accepting and helping them to grow, we help ourselves, forgive ourselves, and enable ourselves to escape their reaches. After the captain rids himself of his secret sharer, he is a changed man. His feeling of inadequacy has entirely vanished and he takes charge of his ship and crew in full confidence that he can body forth in his own person the full authority that he position he occupies demands. It is as though before the young captain could convincingly exercise authority to himself and to his men, he first had to take the law into his own hands and symbolically flout the authority of those above him before he could exert authority over those under him. In this reading of the book, it is as if symbolically, the captain-narrator stands for the official group while Leggatt stands for the deviant individual. By protecting him from the other members of his group, the narrator takes Leggatt's sin on his own shoulders and thereby admits not only his own moral complicity but that of society as well.
ClassicNote on Secret Sharer
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