Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon,
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.
Sylvia Plath, 'Mirror'

To peer too long into a mirror may prove disconcerting. We may recognize aspects of our personality we prefer to forget, and we may become uncomfortably aware that our identity is composed of numerous secret selves. If we stare hard enough we may wonder whether the reflection is completely under our control, and suspect that it might begin to form grimaces and attitudes of its own.

The fear of reflected images, common among primitive peoples, is described at length in Robert Roger's The Double in Literature. There is a widespread belief that shadows, reflections, and portraits of the body are the same as souls, or are at least vitally linked with the well-being of the body. The folk custom of covering mirrors or turning them to the wall after someone has died in a house is based on the idea that the soul reflected in the mirror may be seized by the ghost of the departed. It is thought especially dangerous for sick people to see themselves in a mirror. Even today people can suffer from catoptricophobia—fear of mirrors and reflections—and the superstition that breaking a mirror brings bad luck is a sign that these primitive feelings still run deep. The same fears are often occasioned by pictures. There are still places in Africa, even in a comparatively civilized community such as Khartoum, where it is unwise to take photographs in the street. It is assumed that the photographic image is an extension of the self, and that the camera may thus steal a man's soul from his body. The best-known example of the use of this motif in literature is presumably Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.

A novelist who writes about heroes like himself is creating just such mirror-reflections; indeed it has even been suggested that fictional characters may all be projections of the author, all images of potential selves. Flaubert wrote: 'Madame Bovary, c'est moi'; and it has been argued that Dostoevsky's brothers Karamazov are all different facets of the novelist. Freud has commented on the tendency of modern writers to split up their ego by self-observation into many component egos, and in this way to personify the conflicting trends in their own mental life in many heroes.

Henry James, E. M. Forster, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf are among the many twentieth-century writers who use fiction to explore their own mirror-images. I am thinking of obvious examples, such as 'The Beast in the Jungle', The Longest Journey, Portrait of the Artist, Sons and Lovers or The Waves. The writing of such fictions may help the artist to master anxiety, or exorcize psychological conflicts, to achieve maturity through self-recognition. But the mirror may reveal more than the author intends. We may discern a morbid preoccupation in the writer with his own essence, and a submission to dangerous elements in his make-up. In the case of D. H. Lawrence there is the vicarious participation in sadistic killing in The Plumed Serpent. In Sons and Lovers the treatment of Miriam and Mrs Morel reflects double standards. Behind the supposed events, explanations and evaluations, as recounted by the narrator, the reader discerns that Paul's fixation on his mother accounts for more of his problems than the author consciously realizes. Lawrence's own psychological condition looks out from behind the story like some irrepressible ghost.

Conrad's 'The Secret Sharer' (1910) is one of the greatest examples in fiction of the use of the mirror-image. The device enables him to explore the conflicts in his personality between seaman and artist, loyalty and betrayal, sanity and insanity. The story brilliantly exemplifies the problems of the modern imagination.… In 'The Secret Sharer' he draws on his memories of his first command on the Otago, when he, like the captain-narrator, felt a stranger on his ship. He thus creates an image of himself in the captain, who is then confronted with a second mirror-reflection in Leggatt, the criminal dopplegänger who appeals for help after he has killed a man on board his own ship. Through the two mirrors, both in some way reflections of Conrad, both in some way reflections of each other, he identifies and examines a number of possible roles. Leggatt is both a real flesh-and-blood seaman as well as some kind of alter ego for the captain, and Conrad handles most delicately this double function. But the clue to interpretation of the story is that the mirror-reflections are multiple in meaning rather than simply dual. The story's imaginative success, as I hope to show, is that the dramatic situation bewilders and disturbs the reader, leaving him unsure where he should approve and where disapprove. As the two mirrors, captain and criminal, confront each other, their roles resist clear definition. As soon as we think we have grasped the true meaning of the symbolism, we are startled by some contradictory effect. The story expresses Conrad's sense of the variety of identities available to each intelligent individual. The captain is supposedly being initiated into maturity and responsibility, but we may wonder at certain moments whether the narrator, presumably telling his story years later, is a sane man. The mirror images are used to express rather than resolve the tensions in Conrad's personality, and he refuses to provide the reader with definitive judgments about the value of the identities on offer.

The story was published in 1912 in the volume Twixt Land and Sea together with 'A Smile of Fortune' and 'Freya of the Seven Isles'. In a letter to Garnett, Conrad confessed how much he admired 'The Secret Sharer', how much it satisfied him:

I dare say Freya is pretty rotten. On the other hand the Secret Sharer, between you and me, is it. Eh? Every word fits and there's not a single uncertain note. Luck my boy. Pure luck. I knew you would spot the thing at sight. But I repeat: mere luck.

As the two young men, narrator and Leggatt, put their heads together in whispered colloquies, both dressed in identical sleeping suits, the image unsettles the reader, like some secret dream from the depths of the unconscious. Conrad was right to think he had found a highly stimulating idea from which his imagination could extract a wealth of effects. But he too might have wondered whether the mirrors revealed more than he intended. In this story, as in Under Western Eyes, he seems to use fiction as a kind of exorcism. He creates a drama in which the captain by a supposedly heroic act rids himself of the dark side of his consciousness. The meaning of the end is not so easy to figure out as some writers on Conrad have suggested. I feel that as Leggatt swims away into the darkness it is as if Conrad is saying farewell to some essential element in his artistic identity. The reflection in the mirror bears the soul away.

Both Freudian and Jungian interpretations throw some light on the symbolism of 'The Secret Sharer'. Robert Rogers gives a clear account of the Freudian approach. The captain on a ship has almost unlimited authority, and is easily associated with the psychological father. Leggatt's crime against discipline aboard ship thus becomes a symbol of the primal crime of the son: rebellion against authority. The captain-narrator associates himself with the crime because he feels guilty and inadequate at this moment when he is assuming the responsibility of his first command: 'In Eriksonian terms, the story portrays the new-made captain as undergoing an "identity crisis", an identity crisis which in Freudian terms harks back to the earlier oedipal crisis.' He is anxious whether he has the ability to fulfil his new role, and so fears he is a usurper. The tension between subconscious guilt and a confident sense of responsibility is symbolized in Leggatt's story. His crime is against the established laws of discipline, yet committed in the interests of maintaining order among a crew berserk with fear, and with the purpose of saving the ship: 'Leggatt has, in extremis, usurped the role of his commander in both a maritime and a psychological sense.' By helping the outlaw, the captain proves himself competent and resolute, and he eventually succeeds in getting rid of his scapegoat double. This justifies the happy ending, for he is now secure in his professional role, and no longer feels anxiety and guilt.

The Jungian interpretation is argued most cogently by Albert Guerard. According to this approach, the story, like Heart of Darkness, concerns an insecure and morally isolated man who meets and commits himself to a man even more isolated. In whispered, unrepeatable conversations, he holds communication with his secret self, and this represents a symbolic descent into the unconscious. The real moral dilemma for the captain-narrator is that he must recognize in Leggatt his own potential criminality, his own lower or more primitive self, and so through a new self-awareness initiate himself into true manhood. Integration of the personality occurs when the unconscious has been known, trafficked with and in some sense liberated. In Jungian psychology, as in dreams, the captain's floppy hat represents the personality, which can be transferred symbolically to another. The captain's gift of his hat to Leggatt demonstrates that he now accepts the unconscious self; this generosity saves the ship, and symbolically his own psychic health, when the hat is used as a marker to determine whether the ship has gathered sternway.

Jocelyn Baines treats these symbolic interpretations with some exasperation. In his view, the story is intensely dramatic, but, on the psychological and moral level, rather slight. He specifically attacks Guerard's arguments, and asks how the Jungian interpretation can make any sense of the last sentence, in which Leggatt departs 'a free man, a proud swimmer striking out for a new destiny'. This is no way for a symbol of the unconscious to behave. Baines argues that there is no indication in the story, explicit or implicit, that the captain sees any of his difficulties in Leggatt, or that he performs any self-examination. Nor is there any moral dilemma. There is no evidence in the plot that the captain would have failed as a seaman if Leggatt had not appeared. He realizes his own mistake in abandoning routine to take the anchor watch, and asks himself whether it is ever wise to interfere with the established routine of duties even from the kindest of motives. This occurs before he finds Leggatt at the bottom of the ship's ladder.

In A Reader's Guide to Joseph Conrad, Frederick R. Karl adopts a similar no-nonsense approach. Like Baines, he attacks those who find some kind of cosmic significance in the story: 'The surface in this case is the story, and the surface is the arrival of the Captain at a degree of maturity in which he gains self-respect and confidence.' Karl argues that 'The Secret Sharer' deals principally and simply with the theme of growing up that Conrad dealt with in so many other stories and novels. The captain does not betray the outlaw (as Razumov does), and by arranging his escape proves his own manhood. The story is one of Conrad's best, a microcosm of his major themes, 'but for all its suggestiveness, it is, paradoxically, one of his most straightforward and obvious works. Its narrative is a model of clarity, like those uncomplicated narratives "Youth" and The Shadow-Line.' According to Karl, the story is psychologically shallow, and the theme of the alter ego is laboured to excess.

Baines and Karl have a case which needs answering. Neither the Freudian nor the Jungian interpretations can provide a complete explanation for every important detail of the story. Leggatt possesses several characteristics which unfit him for the role of symbol of the unconscious. He is a sane, determined man who, when immersed in the destructive element of the sea, swims purposefully towards the distant light of the captain's ship; he would never commit suicide. The Freudian analysis fits quite well, but takes attention away from the actual cause of the tension in the captain's mind. He almost breaks down because of the strain imposed by the very real problem of keeping Leggatt's presence hidden from the crew. It is difficult to accept that this is a symbol of his secret oedipal guilt, when he has every reason to fear exposure. Discovery might mean death for Leggatt, and the captain himself might have to stand trial for assisting a murderer to escape. Such rational explanation of his anxiety seems more to the point than a supposed sub-conscious identification with Leggatt's crime.

Yet Baines and Karl ignore many features of the story which do not fit in with their simple interpretations. Guerard is particularly successful in describing the symbolic reverberations of the landscape, the apparition of the headless swimmer, the business with the hat, or the blackness of Koh-ring. Although we may reject any one symbolic interpretation as incomplete, the method of narration suggests hidden meanings, and Freudian or Jungian ideas are inevitably aroused in the reader's mind. Also, the reading that sees this as only a forceful dramatic tale ignores several extraordinary incidents. Neither Leggatt nor the captain is a straightforward character. The various accounts of the murder include elements that suggest that Leggatt is not just an honest Conway boy who killed a man in a fit of justified temper. The captain's behaviour is at times so astonishing that we must look for sources additional to the strain of secrecy. And so we come to the great crux of the narrative, which neither Baines nor Karl considers. Why does the captain sail his ship so near to the black hill of Koh-ring? The obvious reply is that he wishes to give Leggatt every chance to swim safely ashore; but Leggatt has proved himself an excellent swimmer, and so there is no necessity for the ship to shave the land so dangerously close. The captain admits that his heart was in his mouth, and under any other circumstances he would not have held on a moment longer. The crew are convinced they are doomed. The plain fact is that for moral or psychological reasons the captain endangers his ship and the lives of his men unnecessarily, and they are only saved by the lucky accident that the floppy hat, dropped in his escape by Leggatt, serves as a marker in the water. Is this irresponsible piece of daring a sign of maturity, of his competence to assume the role of captain of the ship? It could be said he behaves like a madman. Why? Baines and Karl are clearly wrong to think there is anything simple about this story.

The story begins with a description of landscape whose delicate symbolism is not easy to define:

On my right hand there were lines of fishing-stakes resembling a mysterious system of half-submerged bamboo fences, incomprehensible in its division of the domain of tropical fishes, and crazy of aspect as if abandoned for ever by some nomad tribe of fishermen now gone to the other end of the ocean; for there was no sign of human habitation as far as the eye could reach. To the left a group of barren islets, suggesting ruins of stone walls, towers, and blockhouses, had its foundations set in a blue sea that itself looked solid, so still and stable did it lie below my feet; even the track of light from the westering sun shone smoothly, without that animated glitter which tells of an imperceptible ripple. And when I turned my head to take a parting glance at the tug which had just left us anchored outside the bar, I saw the straight line of the flat shore joined to the stable sea, edge to edge, with a perfect and unmarked closeness, in one levelled floor half brown, half blue under the enormous dome of the sky. Corresponding in their insignificance to the islets of the sea, two small clumps of trees, one on each side of the only fault in the impeccable joint, marked the mouth of the river Meinam we had just left on the first preparatory stage of our homeward journey; and, 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 from the vain task of exploring the monotonous sweep of the horizon. Here and there gleams as of a few scattered pieces of silver marked the windings of the great river; and on the nearest of them, just within the bar, the tug steaming right into the land became lost to my sight, hull and funnel and masts, as though the impassive earth had swallowed her up without an effort, without a tremor. My eye followed the light cloud of her smoke, now here, now there, above the plain, according to the devious curves of the stream, but always fainter and farther away, till I lost it at last behind the mitre-shaped hill of the great pagoda. And then I was left alone with my ship, anchored at the head of the Gulf of Siam.

The fishing stakes are 'mysterious', 'incomprehensible' and 'crazy', suggesting perhaps man's failure to impose his patterns of work on nature. The islets, like ruins, have their foundations in a blue sea whose 'solid', 'stable' quality we know to be an illusion. There is already a hint of menace, of man's isolation in a dangerous and inexplicable universe. Land, sea and sky merge together in a moment of stillness, a kind of dream-landscape, typical in Conrad as the hero approaches his test. The objects he perceives appear beyond his control, for there will be no consolations for his lonely mind in the monotonous sweep of Nature. The tug seems to have been swallowed up by the impassive earth, as all man-made things will eventually return to the non-human neutrality of the primal forms of matter. In Joseph Conrad: The Imaged Style, Wilfred S. Dowden argues that the insignificant twin clumps of trees suggest the dyadic aspects of the captain's personality, and that the pagoda represents the higher ground of self-knowledge. Conrad's symbolic landscapes rarely convey such precise connotations. Indeed, it is the lack of significance which is being stressed. As the captain's eye watches the smoke of the tug gradually disappearing along the river, the scene suggests how little the eye can know, understand or control. The main impression is of insubstantiality. Later in the story the hill of Koh-ring and the stars above appear to move while the ship stands still; human reference points have no absolute validity. The ordeal takes place in a 'phantom' sea, a 'sleepy gulf', as if the captain and Leggatt inhabit an area of consciousness on the borders of dreams. This insubstantiality of the physical universe is for Conrad a simple fact which has to be accepted. The captain's quest for self-identification will not be helped by his perceptions of exterior objects. He must seek to find himself in his subjective consciousness, where sense-impressions never entirely lose the aspect of hallucination.

The captain admits he lacks self-confidence. The crew have been together for eighteen months; he is a stranger and, except for the second mate, the youngest. We begin to wonder what sort of man he is when he tells us: 'I was somewhat of a stranger to myself.' After his foolish decision to take the anchor watch, he enjoys introspective ruminations under the stars. He has not integrated himself into his appointed role, has not merged his separate identity into the functions demanded of a captain. We may sympathize with this imaginative side to his temperament, and conclude that this suggests he is superior to a conventional captain such as Mac Whirr. But in the opening paragraphs he shows his inexperience of life. He rejoices in the great security of the sea as compared with the unrest of the land, in his choice of an untempted life presenting no disquieting problems, 'invested with an elementary moral beauty by the absolute straightforwardness of its appeal and by the singleness of its purpose'. Events are to prove that the sea can make confusing claims, and we may recall Jim's similar feeling of security just before the Patna collision.

Leggatt's self-confidence contrasts with the self-questioning, Hamlet-like behaviour of the captain. He first appears in the water at the bottom of the ladder like a headless corpse. It is the captain's fault that the ladder has been left overboard, as if he had subconsciously willed that Leggatt should come from the depths of the sea. In the phosphorescent flash caused by summer lightning on the water, Leggatt appears like a denizen from another world. What the captain draws up from the sleeping waters corresponds with his own dream of an ideal personality, or at first appears to do so. Leggatt is active, energetic and self-possessed, and has proved himself in dangerous extremities. Throughout the ensuing days the captain must confront this ideal image in living reality, must try to keep up to Leggatt's standards by successfully organizing the rescue. He must establish that his own head could properly be worn by Leggatt's body, that he has the right to recognize himself in his brave alter ego. But in this confrontation between extrovert and introvert, the ideal and the actual, the captain is torn apart by inherent ambiguities and tensions in both roles. On the one hand his own active imagination induces a collapse of self-control, and a submission to neurotic strain. On the other, Leggatt's courageous service to the ship apparently involves a primitive, savage determination to survive.

After Leggatt has come on board and is hiding in the captain's cabin, many of the narrator's actions can be explained as legitimate devices to hide the outlaw from the crew. But soon the reader who has been vicariously identifying with the captain starts to feel uneasy and embarrassed. The captain's response to the crisis suggests extreme neuroticism. On the first morning, when he can eat nothing at breakfast, he already has to confess 'the dual working of my mind distracted me almost to the point of insanity'. The mental experience of being in two places at once affects him physically, 'as if the mood of secrecy had penetrated my soul'. He so far forgets himself that having occasion to ask the mate, who is standing by his side, to take a compass bearing on the Pagoda, he reaches up to his ear in whispers. A little later he startles the helmsman by moving to look at the compass with a stealthy gait as if he were in a sick room. He admits he had crept 'quietly as near insanity as any man who has not actually gone over the border'. Such lack of self-control hardly justifies those commentators who deduce that through the ordeal he proves his manhood. His reaction to the test is extraordinary, quite different from that of a brave man tackling a dangerous adventure. On one occasion he says of Leggatt: 'But there was nothing sickly in his eyes or in his expression. He was not a bit like me, really.' This is a surprising admission from the narrator. It implies that the captain has something sickly in his temperament; his antics with the mate and helmsman suggest confrontation with his alter ego shocks his soul to its very depth.

Leggatt claims the murder was justified. In a letter to Galsworthy, Conrad expressed shock that anyone should consider Leggat to be a murderous ruffian. Baines describes how Conrad deliberately toned down the details of the crime which he took from an actual incident on the Cutty Sark The mate of the Cutty Sark was a despotic character with a sinister reputation, who killed an incompetent negro with a blow of a capstan bar. In contrast, Leggatt seems a model officer, whose bravery when he set the reefed foresail saved the ship. He strangled the insubordinate member of the crew in a fit of blind rage, dazed and eventually unconscious of what he was doing under the force of the huge wave that came over the side. The captain-narrator ascribes the murder to a justifiable sense of desperation: '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.'

At sea it is arguable that any act, even murder, committed to the end of keeping the ship afloat is moral. Leggatt has proved adequate where the true captain, Archbold, failed, and Archbold tries to cover up his weakness, his immorality in terms of the sea, by committing Leggatt to be hanged by the law of the land. Leggatt correctly judges that twelve respectable tradesmen in England will never comprehend the violent extremities necessitated by the morality of the sea.

And yet Leggatt's crime is not presented as just a fit of temper, and there are certain peculiar aspects to this outburst of violence. Leggatt behaves like a man possessed. He takes the insolent seaman by the throat, and goes on shaking him like a rat. When the great wave comes overboard, ten minutes are supposed to elapse before the two men are found together jammed behind the forebits. Leggatt tells the narrator: 'It's clear that I meant business, because I was holding him by the throat still when they picked us up. He was black in the face.' The crew are at first unable to prise Leggatt's fingers loose from around his victim's neck, and it is some time before he recovers consciousness. It is as if at this moment of heroic trial and endeavour his will has been abandoned to primitive, destructive urges. For a moment we may recall Kurtz, the apostle of the Savage God. Both Captain Archbold and his crew react to the killing as an event of unnatural horror, as though these ordinary, unexceptional seamen had been granted a glimpse of another dimension of being. Leggatt compares the crash of the wave to the sky falling on his head. The sea had gone mad: 'I suppose the end of the world will be something like that.' Like Kurtz, Leggatt is a man whose courage has carried him outside civilized restraints, to confront a moment of ultimate truth beyond the ken of normal social conventions.

Leggatt's case suggests that human survival depends on energetic self-assertion, and that men of his exceptional calibre may find themselves taken over by the desire for criminal violence. He admits that if he had tried to break out of his cabin when he was imprisoned on the Sephora he might have been forced to kill again. He explains that after his door had been left unlocked, and he had swum away from the ship, he was determined not to be dragged back 'fighting like a wild beast'. He is compared to Cain, and however much we sympathize with him, we must acknowledge that he is a man who would always kill to save himself from death. When the captain narrator himself is forced to act, and to make the crew comply with his orders to turn the ship about, he shakes the mate's arm violently, and goes on shaking it, rather as Leggatt shakes the seaman he kills. This story conveys no simple faith in the values of the good seaman. As in Heart of Darkness, the man of action submits himself to the ambiguous claims of the destructive element.

And so we come to the climax of the story, the captain's decision to sail his ship dangerously and unnecessarily close to the shore of Koh-ring. As usual in Conrad, we are given hints and possibilities rather than one clear motive. The captain sympathizes with Leggatt's isolation after the murder, and by the rash act of sailing close to the shore tries to give him a convincing demonstration of moral support. As Leggatt swims away he will appreciate the reason for this gesture, and this will console him later as he wanders barefoot under the alien sun. Is this what the captain means when he reiterates that 'it was now a matter of conscience to shave the land as close as possible'? But was such an extraordinary risk essential merely to encourage Leggatt with an expression of sympathy? If we take this as a sign of the captain's commitment to a fellow human being, then we must also accept that he endangers the lives of his crew in the process.

We must deduce that the captain sails close to Koh-ring because of some psychological necessity in his own being. He needs to prove his manhood by this act of self-assertion. He wants to behave in a daring and apparently irrational manner because of deep subjective needs he himself never seems properly to understand. Two contradictory attitudes are possible to this decision. We might argue that the captain identifies himself with Leggatt as an exceptional man who has courageously demonstrated that greatness involves the breaking of the social conventions, the law of the land. The captain proves to himself that he is not a rigid automaton, blindly obeying the seaman's code, but that he too in exceptional circumstances will take exceptional measures, wherever they may lead. But does this argument mean that action outside social conventions involves a submission to violence and irrationality? Is not the captain proving himself a dangerous lunatic who should never be given charge of a ship again? What evidence is there that he will never behave so foolishly a second time? And if we approve of his daring act, then do we agree that he would be right to repeat it on a comparable occasion? Anyone who holds that argument should be asked if he would like to travel as a passenger with the captain-narrator on the bridge.

As usual, this ambiguous treatment of heroic action reflects the tension in Conrad's own mind between loyal service to the seaman's code and a sense that his artistic nature and beliefs involve repudiation of social conventions. This imaginative obsession determines the symbolism of Koh-ring. The hill hangs over the crew 'like a towering fragment of the everlasting night'. The ship glides towards this enormous mass of blackness like 'a bark of the dead floating in slowly under the very gate of Erebus'. Once again Conrad depicts the journey towards the moment of truth, of self-recognition, as a voyage into the country of the dead. Just as in the opening description the tug appears swallowed up by the land, so the captain feels his ship is about to be 'swallowed up' by the shadow of Kohring. He confronts fearlessly the ultimate extinction of the subjective consciousness, the annihilation of human forms. By sailing as close as possible to the blackness, he proves that, unlike Lord Jim, he will never be rendered impotent by the vision of an ultimate meaninglessness. After this initiation, the man of imagination is fit to rule as captain. He forgets the secret stranger as he attends to the business of taking his ship away from danger: 'Already the ship was drawing ahead. And I was alone with her. Nothing! no one in the world should stand now between us, throwing a shadow on the way of silent knowledge and mute affection, the perfect communion of a seaman with his first command.'

And yet there is a sense of loss. The captain has enjoyed a special relationship with Leggatt which now is ended (and there is no need to support this argument by finding hints of homosexuality). The Freudian interpretation is that the ship is feminine, and the captain can now accept a mature sexual role, having purged the guilty shadow of the father. But Leggatt's status as hero and criminal, and his disappearance towards Koh-ring, the country of the dead, arouse other responses in the reader's imagination. The daring act of sailing the ship too close to shore seems to act like an exorcism for the captain. Leggatt has involved him in experiences which have brought him close to insanity, and which have demonstrated that his secret imaginative life might throw him completely off balance. He rids himself of this area of experience by depositing Leggatt at the very gate of Erebus. Is it possible that the efficient captain of the future will have forfeited the imaginative side of his nature which made him exceptional?

The last line rings out with apparent confidence, yet only adds to our uncertainties. Our last glimpse of Leggatt is of a man lowering himself in the water to take his punishment: 'a free man, a proud swimmer striking out for a new destiny'. Is the captain in future to live a life confined and circumscribed by the seaman's code? Should we in contrast prefer to admire the free man who in isolation, carrying his knowledge of guilt, makes a new destiny outside the security of civilization? Is it perhaps true that this story meant so much to Conrad because it enacted his own need to exorcize his mirror-image, to jettison those fantasies of alienation and suicidal loneliness which were disturbing his own balance of mind?