“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. It is intensely dramatic but, on the psychological and moral level, rather slight.”[15]
