Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” “ In order to live with direction and an understanding of what is going on around you, one must understand and know what goes on inside himself.” - William Page In Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer”, the Captain of the vessel finds that he does not know himself as well as he thinks. It is not until a castaway, Leggatt, arrives that the captain finally achieves a level of self understanding and completion. Leggatt serves as the Captain’s complimenting double, and his actions and thoughts eventually help the captain learn about himself and create stronger character. As the story opens, the young captain is standing out on the deck looking at the scenery as the ship pulls away. In the distance he notices a ship and on his right, two clumps of trees marking the river's mouth. He notices the “flat shore joined to the stable sea (83).” The captain can scarcely discern where one element of nature begins and another ends. Similarly, at this point he himself is at a faintly discerning line between immaturity and maturity, between landsmen and seamen. He is an outsider according to the skeptical crew and he is a stranger to his ship and himself. At this point, the captain’s lack of confidence in himself as a leader, and his fearful awe of the ship dominate his character. This is illustrated as the captain decides to stand guard over the anchor. While this task is often left to lower ranking officers on the ship, he does not allow any one to do the task but himself. The captain remains because of his overwhelming feeling of inadequacy as leader of the ship. He feels a clear distinction between what he must become and what he currently is. However, the captain is soon given help in finding himself and his place on the ship. While he stands guard, a man appears from the ladder. Leggatt was a persecuted sailor from the nearby ship. He decided to jump in the water and swim to the light he saw (the ship) as opposed to taking the punishment on his ship. As the captain allows him to come aboard, readers notice an almost immediate connection between the two men. Leggatt hops up on board and introduces himself to the captain, “the name’s Leggatt (88).” He presents himself to the captain as man who has nothing to hide. He does not try to conceal anything but shows “his hand”, and this is something the captain immediately ... ... middle of paper ... ...which way the ship is moving. Suddenly, he sees something white on the black water, his floppy hat. 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. More significantly, and ironically, however, the hat literally points the way to the Captain's successful maneuvering of his ship to a safe place. This is an act that insures his acceptance and the salvation of himself, his ship, and all those aboard the ship. By helping his "dark self," by accepting and helping him to grow, the captain helped himself to grow, and enabled himself to escape his dark sides 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. The full authority and self understanding that his job demands is no longer out of reach, but rather a part of him as a result of Leggatt. Works Cited Conrad, Joseph. "The Secret Sharer" ed. Jerome Beaty. The Norton Introduction to Literature 8th ed. New York. W.W. Norton & Co., 2002.
The lantern and the snow are both bright and shiny, showing that they carry some hope, but the skipper’s eyes are emotionless, spiritless, and dead. There are no lingering emotions in the skipper’s eyes; no sadness, no remorse, not even any more confidence. Unlike the daughter who still has “salt tears in her eyes” (line 82), showing that she dies painfully and with a heavy heart, the skipper has no emotion mentioned. The author’s description of the skipper’s eyes finalizes how he felt nothing towards what he had brought his daughter into. This connects back to Longfellow’s message as it depicts how overconfidence can destroy a person without control. Judging by how the skipper felt no emotion in his final moments, he wasn’t aware of what was going on around him. The skipper still wasn’t aware that he destroyed himself; it happened uncontrollably. Longfellow also uses imagery to describe how the fisherman saw the daughter’s hair. It was like “brown sea-weed/ On the billows fall and rise” (lines 83-84). Readers feel sympathy and pity for the daughter whose body is helplessly being swung around by the waves. An innocent and loving being is destroyed because of the skipper’s
As the ship plowed the sea for eight days, the chugging rhythm of its engines reverberated in Ted’s head: Da-da-DA-da-da-DUM-DUM, da-DA-da-da-DUM (Morgan, 80). Even after the Kungsholm had been docked for days, this rhythm was still stuck in his head. Taking Helen’s suggestion, he set out to develop a story around the rhythm, using the shipboard notes that began with “a stupid horse and a wagon (Morgan, 81).
Captain Aubrey exhibits and demonstrates leadership characteristics that inspire his crew to be the best that they can be. One of the most important leadership traits that Captain Jack has is a single-minded focus on his purpose. All of his decisions are held up against the g...
The captain is characterized as incompetent even at sailing a ship despite his title. The captain should have been the one to lead the castaways but his incompetence caused the island dwellers to despise him. Ten years after being marooned on the island, “the captain become a very boring person, without enough to think about, without enough to do.”(294). Trying to find a purpose to his boring life, the captain hovered around a spring, the island’s only water supply. He would tell the kanka-bono girls the kind of mood the spring was in on that day despite the fact that “The dribbling [from the spring] was in fact quite steady, and had been for thousands of years”(295). The kanka-bono girls did not speak english and therefore the captain’s attempt at humanising the spring were lost on the girls making it a completely pointless endeavor. Moreover,If not for the lack of tools on the island, the captain would have tried to improve the springs and consequently might have clogged it(296) potentially putting the life of castaways at risk. The captain was desperate to find a purpose to his mundane life on the island, so much that he was willing to put his and the island’s inhabitant 's life at risk. The captain’s attempt at accomplishing something to find a purpose in his life was useless and even
The story’s theme is related to the reader by the use of color imagery, cynicism, human brotherhood, and the terrible beauty and savagery of nature. The symbols used to impart this theme to the reader and range from the obvious to the subtle. The obvious symbols include the time from the sinking to arrival on shore as a voyage of self-discovery, the four survivors in the dinghy as a microcosm of society, the shark as nature’s random destroyer of life, the sky personified as mysterious and unfathomable and the sea as mundane and easily comprehended by humans. The more subtle symbols include the cigars as representative of the crew and survivors, the oiler as the required sacrifice to nature’s indifference, and the dying legionnaire as an example of how to face death for the correspondent.
Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness Written by Joseph Conrad in the early 20th century, "The Heart of
The author shows the reader the sea just as the sailor does as death, but more than death
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness ; And, The Secret Sharer. New York: Signet Classic, 1997. Print.
In the novice the first mate hides behind his belief that the ship the Sally Anne would last forever and that he could stay attached to it. At the beginning of the story the mate had believed so forcefully and overwhelmingly that the boat could never be destroyed. He had believed that the boats “intricacy would protect it” He thought that because of how complex of a project that it had been and how majestic the boat had been would
The story describes the protagonist who is coming of age as torn between the two worlds which he loves equally, represented by his mother and his father. He is now mature and is reflecting on his life and the difficulty of his childhood as a fisherman. Despite becoming a university professor and achieving his father’s dream, he feels lonely and regretful since, “No one waits at the base of the stairs and no boat rides restlessly in the waters of the pier” (MacLeod 261). Like his father, the narrator thinks about what his life could have been like if he had chosen another path. Now, with the wisdom and experience that comes from aging and the passing of time, he is trying to make sense of his own life and accept that he could not please everyone. The turmoil in his mind makes the narrator say, “I wished that the two things I loved so dearly did not exclude each other in a manner that was so blunt and too clear” (MacLeod 273). Once a decision is made, it is sometimes better to leave the past and focus on the present and future. The memories of the narrator’s family, the boat and the rural community in which he spent the beginning of his life made the narrator the person who he is today, but it is just a part of him, and should not consume his present.
The myth of Orpheus and his descent into the underworld is paralleled in Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Sharer," revealing a common theme, the narrator's self-fulfillment through the conclusion of his symbolic and inward quest. This parallel, which may be called archetypal, serves to increase the reader's sense of identification with Conrad's narrator, and it lends an otherworldly tone to the work as a whole. Likewise, these echoes of Orphic material lead the reader through three stages. These are a modern and secular rendition of the descent into the unknown, followed by a symbolic rebirth or rejoining of the fractured portions of the complete self, and finally the parting with the previous 'self' that ostensibly existed in the initial state.
The human voyage into life is basically feeble, vulnerable, uncontrollable. Since the crew on a dangerous sea without hope are depicted as "the babes of the sea", it can be inferred that we are likely to be ignorant strangers in the universe. In addition to the danger we face, we have to also overcome the new challenges of the waves in the daily life. These waves are "most wrongfully and barbarously abrupt and tall", requiring "a new leap, and a leap." Therefore, the incessant troubles arising from human conditions often bring about unpredictable crises as "shipwrecks are apropos of nothing." The tiny "open boat", which characters desperately cling to, signifies the weak, helpless, and vulnerable conditions of human life since it is deprived of other protection due to the shipwreck. The "open boat" also accentuates the "open suggestion of hopelessness" amid the wild waves of life. The crew of the boat perceive their precarious fate as "preposterous" and "absurd" so much so that they can feel the "tragic" aspect and "coldness of the water." At this point, the question of why they are forced to be "dragged away" and to "nibble the sacred cheese of life" raises a meaningful issue over life itself. This pessimistic view of life reflects the helpless human condition as well as the limitation of human life.
John Mayer, an American personality psychologist, who majors on personality issues, explains on the negative and positive sides of character traits by proposing that the negative one is based on unreasonable, timid, and apprehensive attributes, while the positive side concerns logical courageous, and gallant traits. It is important that a person identifies his or her different characteristics, and try to balance them so as to avoid getting various mental aberrations. “The Secret Sharer” is a story about a sailor with two-sided personality attributes as narrated by Joseph Conrad. In order for the audience to comprehend about distinct identities, Conrad incorporates the theme doppelganger in his story. According to the story, a young captain possesses a cowardly character, which is not good for a captain commanding a sailing ship. People who are meant to “lead others or be their boss should have fearless, heroic, and domineering characters” (Mayer 215). Due to his uneasy character, the captain first refuses to introduce himself to Leggat who he saves from the sea. The narrator states that "I thought the time had come to declare myself ‘I am the captain’” (Conrad 2). The statement shows that the captain is reluctant to reveal himself because he is aware of his spineless nature, given that he is the captain. According to Mayer, “Most people who possess leadership positions with weak character traits are often afraid to disclose their status to others” (Mayer 273). As the two sailors talk about their experiences, the captain starts to change his current personality and acquire that of Leggatt. The raconteur asserts that "I had become so connected in thoughts and impressions with the secret sharer of my cabin that I felt as if I, personally, were being given to understand that I, too, was not the sort that would have done for the chief mate of a ship like the Sephora. I had no doubt of it in my
But even though Our Man is stricken with bad luck throughout this film, he always finds a way stays calm and always tries to fix the situation as best as he can. These types of examples can be shown throughout the whole film. The first example of this is when a shipping container collides with his ship. He comes up with a way to get his yacht away from the container away as it leaks running shoes into the ocean. Another example is when Our Man is not pleased when he discovers that his radio is waterlogged and his communications gear compromised. He tries to fix it when he climbs the mast to repair an antenna lead. But he sees storm is heading his way. He has no choice but to sail into the storm which tosses him and his boat around. His body is battered by the wind and the water, but through all of that he emerges from that horrible mess with only a cut on his forehead. Additionally, despite the feelings of puzzlement about his bad luck, Our Man has the foresight to realize that he will have to leave his beloved Virginia Jean and take refuge in a rescue craft. He gathers his meager supply of canned food, a large container of fresh water, and a few other odds and ends. He is smart enough to know that his only hope for survival is to use his sextant and nautical maps to get to a shipping lane where he can signal for help. Though his analysis and composure of the situation is outstanding, Our Man has
Fleishman, Avrom. Condrad's Politics: Community and Anarchy in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1967.