The much-discussed "The Secret Sharer" (completed in 1909) most skillfully dramatizes Conrad's concerns at this time. It is important to say at once that I am not considering the story as a Jungian fable. "The Secret Sharer" seems more interesting to me as a study in the actualized structure of doubleness—thus I treat it as an intellectual story of qualified emotional force. The story's opening is quite similar to the openings of its precursors, differing from them only in the young narrator's intuition of his ship's power, her strong part in his existence.

In this breathless pause at the threshold of a long passage we seemed to be measuring our fitness for a long and arduous enterprise, the appointed task of both our existences to be carried out, far from all human eyes, with only sky and sea for spectators and for judges.

In The Mirror of the Sea Conrad had told his readers that a ship is like a man's character,—made and tested by experience and hence a work of art. The young captain, whose "ideal conception" of himself is to be tested with his ship, is like Conrad, the writer who is about to test his character in a projected course of his own making. The background of this endeavor is the sea:

And suddenly I rejoiced in the great security of the sea as compared with the unrest of the land, in my choice of that untempted life presenting no disquieting problems, invested with an elementary moral beauty by the absolute straight-forwardness of its appeal and by the singleness of its purpose.

When Leggatt comes aboard and begins to tell his story, the narrator realizes that what he is hearing "was no mere formula of desperate speech, but a real alternative in the view of a strong soul". Leggatt's youth apparently guarantees him the ability to confront clear issues, and the narrator's immediate understanding of this is in marked contrast to the circuitous way, in Conrad's earlier stories, by which the deeply problematic aspects of the past had been evoked to trouble the present. Reality and unmistakable clarity are important new additions to the erupting past; consequently, the narrator has powers of sympathetic intuition and "mysterious communication." Leggatt, in other words, must be rescued in no uncertain way and for no uncertain reason. There is a bond of simple, uncomplicatd sympathy, one man for another.

This seems to be the point that grants the Jungians license to interpret the story as, the progress toward the integration of the unconscious self. But surely "integration" in some manner is a feature of all fiction anyway; moreover, this story possesses a number of deliberate details whose interest extends beyond their use as prescriptions for psychic good health. The bond of sympathy between the narrator and Leggatt, for instance, is sudden, just as an action is impulsive, and the explanation for that bond is given afterwards. Thus Conrad's psychological bias is preserved, with thought following action. The amorphous sea, upon whose surface nothing can remain reflected for long, yields to Leggatt, whose function as a mirror, it appears, is secure in the narrator's consciousness. Conrad is no longer hopelessly trying to establish causal relations between past and present. Instead, he summons a person out of the past whose restless flight embodies an old "secret action" that seeks sympathetic recognition in the present. While Leggatt is a real person, he is also an image according to which the young narrator can see himself in an extreme intellectual and moral perspective. Discrete rather than indeterminate recollection, courageous self-identification rather than shameful retreat—these are the benefits that Leggatt brings to the becalmed young captain. In "Youth" Conrad had worried about the feeling that might disrupt the narrative. In "The Secret Sharer" Leggatt is like a feeling of rebelliousness that has become both intrinsic to and alive in the narrative. In still different terms, Leggatt is an economy for the benefit of the narrator's understanding of himself, just as the sailor-become-writer is an economy for Conrad's benefit.

But why, then, is Leggatt introduced as a fugitive outcast? Why was Conrad anxious to make Leggatt and the narrator aware of crime's enormity as well as its supposed justification? It would be too easy to say that Conrad's sympathy with Leggatt provoked a temporizing moral attitude. There is a trace of slightly embarrassed zeal in Leggatt's narrative, which may convey a poignancy that Conrad himself felt. Like Leggatt, Conrad had covered the artistic failures he felt as an author with a pose of aggressive self-assertion. The conventional opprobrium attached to murder haunts Leggatt's crime. Yet Leggatt's attitude toward what he has done lies somewhere between shame and pride, between guilt and righteous vindictiveness. And so does Conrad's. Consequently, the morality of "The Secret Sharer" moves within a self-consciously aesthetic framework of values that is not sustained by universal imperatives like "my station and its duties." Whatever imperatives pertain now are eminently personal and temperamental: Leggatt is like the poete maudit who supplants conventional morality with the power of his personality. All in all, some of Leggatt's traits are motifs in a dramatic paraphrase of the peculiar mismatch between Conrad's scrupulous self-commentary and his public pretenses.

The reason for the narrator's sympathy is explained a few moments later: "It was, in the night, as though I had been faced by my own reflection in the depths of a sombre and immense mirror". There are two important points to make about this sentence. One is that intruder from the past, for the first time in Conrad's short fiction, is not sought out as an instrument for magically reordering things, as a symbol for the use of the narrative consciousness (as Mrs. Hervey is for Hervey). On the contrary, Leggatt is a direct reflection of the narrator; he is a person in whom the young narrator can see himself, clearly and directly. In the second place, we must remember that the large mirror of the sea, heedless and immense, had already established itself in Conrad's mental cosmology; so we see that Leggatt, in spite of his extenuating crime, first defies and then replaces the larger sea mirror with himself.

Evidence of mismatch continues to appear in the tale as the two young men gradually adjust to each other's trials. Leggatt's interpretation of his escape appeals to the young narrator because of its familiarity. The relaxed entreaty of "the 'brand of Cain' business" is not at all like the disquieting strangeness of Kurtz's moral exile. The results of Kurtz's outrages upon convention had required endless, inconclusive elucidation. In Leggatt's narrative, however, "there was something that made comment impossible… a sort of feeling, a quality, which I can't find a name for." Nevertheless, all is not well. It is significant that at an important point in his narrative Leggatt says that he had been swimming in what seemed to be a thousand-foot cistern, from which there was no escape. Is this not a deliberate recollection of Conrad's own struggle in the black cave? A short time later the young narrator, having accepted Leggatt as his secret sharer, says:

and 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, sleeping in that bed, behind that door which faced me as I sat at the head of the table. It was very much like being mad, only it was worse because one was aware of it.

The young narrator's consciousness has absorbed the full import of the masquerade, and from now on we can assume that his mind, displacing Leggatt's, is really at the center of the tale. He too, like Conrad, feels the effects of the imposture.

In the second half of the tale, it is the captain of the Sephora, Leggatt's ship, who represents the general fear of being taken to task for the game of disguise and concealment. Perhaps it is too bold a speculation, but I like to think that in some ways the captain's "spiritless tenacity" is distinctly reminiscent of Conrad's publishers, and even of his public, always curious, always demanding to have and know more. The narrator says:

My lack of excitement, of curiosity, of surprise, of any sort of pronounced interest, began to arouse his distrust. But except for the felicitous pretence of deafness I had not tried to pretend anything. I had felt utterly incapable of playing the part of ignorance properly, and therefore was afraid to try. It is also certain that he had brought some ready-made suspicions with him, and that he viewed my politeness as a strange and unnatural phenomenon. And yet how else could I have received him? Not heartily! That was impossible for psychological reasons, which I need not state here. My only object was to keep off his inquiries. Surlily? Yes, but surliness might have provoked a point-blank question. From its novelty to him and from its nature, punctilious courtesy was the manner best calculated to restrain the man. But there was the danger of his breaking through my defence bluntly. I could not, I think, have met him by a direct lie, also for psychological (not moral) reasons. If he had only known how afraid I was of his putting my feeling of identity with the other to the test! But strangely enough—(I thought of it only afterwards)—I believe that he was not a little disconcerted by the reverse side of that weird situation, by something in me that reminded him of the man he was seeking—suggested a mysterious similitude to the young fellow he had distrusted and disliked from the first.

This is an excellent example of what Sartre would call refuge from an unbearable situation; the evasion of the narrator is mercifully helped along by the captain's stupidity. Nevertheless, the captain's effect on the course of the tale is considerable, since through his questions Leggatt and the narrator learn that the supposedly dead fugitive from conventional punishment must remain "dead." Leggatt must remain secret and obscure. This is again a transformation of the "obscurity" and "mystery" so prevalent in Conrad's earlier work. Whereas previously the desire to illuminate obscurity led one only into more obscurity, here the elucidation of obscurity is accomplished, even though it is only the narrator who finally possesses the secret he shares with Leggatt. Surely this is an illustration of Baudelaire's dictum that all the phenomena of the artist's double nature are possessed by the artist. When Leggatt reminds the narrator that "we are not living in a boy's adventure tale," he is prohibiting implications that would make of the whole episode a simple question of sensation or adventure, or even one with a conventional explanation.

The narrator ironically affirms Leggatt's reminder by admitting to himself that he would be very glad if the fugitive left the ship. Having created in his life a dual image of himself, like Conrad, the young captain must launch it with a daring navigational exploit; this is the exercise of art, as James would have said, flying in the face of expectations. Conrad's remark to Garnett that "every truth requires some pretence to make it live" is also pertinent. Truth resides in the young captain's determination to free himself by mastery of his metier, to prove himself a good sailor. The analogy is close at hand: Conrad desires the exultant freedom of the acclaimed novelist. The ship is suddenly put about (Conrad defiantly altering the course of his work) and Leggatt whispers, "'Be careful'… I realized suddenly 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." There is now a period of "intolerable stillness," a return to the opening mood of pervasive calm. But now the narrator is armed with objective knowledge of the past and can use it to create a convincing show of craft and self-mastery. Leggatt leaves the ship; the captain is left "alone with his command." Swimming off, Leggatt, is "a free man, a proud swimmer striking out for a new destiny."

"The Secret Sharer" contains, then, the double working out and rescue that Conrad now saw as the momentary salvation for his embattled self. Leggatt rescue the captain and the captain rescues Leggatt—an apparently straightforward interchange administered with "piety." Moreover, the acceptance of a fact of past experience is taken in and used to alleviate an unrelieved tension in the present. Lastly, a convincing image of human kinship, modally altered to one expressed in terms of action and sympathy as opposed to action and thought, sends the figure from the past back into the unknown, free from constricting troubles, and sends the present consciousness into the future, armed with reassured mastery.