judgment, the story itself requires a kind of physical closeness. Brothers themselves promote this kind of relationship, and suggest even further the nexus of involvement from which neither will ever be free. The physical setting of life on board a ship reinforces this requirement. Life at sea shows an isolated society, but one that in its very isolation seems to render more intense the gravest issues. Matters are stripped to moral fundamentals. Moreover, the very confinement suggests the unavoidability and even the fatal inexorability of the theme. Despite the moral expansion of the theme in Conrad's hands, the context itself suggests some of the grimmer aspects of the story. And indeed, while holding his ship at the head of the gulf of Siam, the young captain (also narrator) communicates some sense of the sheer momentousness of the journey involved: "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 tasks of both our existences to be carried out, far from all human eyes, with only sky and sea for spectators and for judges."

The young captain seems to have had some premonition of the implications of the passage. "I wondered how far I should turn out faithful to that ideal conception of one's own personality every man sets up for himself secretly." That he should have entertained these concerns would have of itself indicated his own complexity. Nevertheless, what he seems to enjoy about life at sea is its absence of complexity, in fact, its very regularity and straightforwardness: "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 straightforwardness of its appeal and by the singleness of its purpose." This is almost too much: with the coming of Leggatt he will encounter the opposite of every single virtue he thought the sea represented.

We know of course that the coming of the double is as much a response as it is a summons. The young man is called, but there is something in his nature that initiates the calling. If the double is divisive, he is coming in response to an already existent division. While valuing straightforwardness, singleness of purpose, the untempted life, the greater security of the sea, the young captain shows evidence, muted and subtle though it may be, of being not quite reconciled to the life of security that his choice of the sea seems to promise. Not only is he a "stranger to the ship" (including, of course, the crew by virtue of his recent appointment—they had been together for eighteen months), but, more important, he is a stranger to himself ("and if all the truth must be told, I was somewhat of a stranger to myself "). That he assumes the anchor watch, where the fateful meeting occurs, is itself regarded as an irregular action for a captain. In short, the coming of Leggatt is not a gratuitous event, but rather in response to some maverick quality in the young captain. But it is more than maverick; it shows a higher responsiveness to the order of things.

From its origins in Genesis, where such fundamental divisions are described, to its role in the drama of Christian salvation history, the Cain-Abel story was invested with a sense of mystery. So, too, the double adds to the mysterious connections and resonances. The meeting takes place far from the scenes of domesticated society, in a kind of no-man's-land—the volume in which "The Secret Sharer" first appeared was called 'Twixt Land and Sea. In the new, yet old, closed arena of the Cain-Abel story there is more than meets the eye. The evidence of the senses requires greater capacity for interpretation, for understanding. The slightly wayward, even fugitive, instincts of the young captain reveal his inner directions. This is why the double, the changed valuations of the Cain-Abel characters, with the greater emphasis on better awareness, and the sense of a momentous encounter, all come together in a sense of mystery.

The mystery is associated with Leggatt's coming and with the role he plays. The young captain is shocked enough at the apparition of a figure floating alongside his boat to let his cigar drop into the water. The captain's impression after a brief exchange was that Leggatt was about to swim away—"mysterious as he came." "A mysterious communication" establishes itself between the two. The phrase is used again and again. Leggatt later recollects the reassurance he felt in the captain's quiet voice—"as if you had expected me." When preparations are finally made for Leggatt to depart secretly, the young captain begins apologetically, "I won't be there to see you go." And then he resumes, only to cut himself short abruptly, an ellipsis that is rhetorically typical in the work, indicating an unexpressed but deeper understanding. "The rest.… I only hope I have understood, too." "You have," Leggatt reassures him, "From first to last."

From first to last. Although the young captain's understanding is not yet complete, his psychic life conveys him in the direction he wishes to go. His final understanding, with all that it implies of more fundamental division and separation, is that Leggatt has had imposed upon him the fate of Cain. This is not Citizen Cain, nor the Abhorred Other with monstrous progeny, but rather Cain as Sacred Executioner, who performs a violent act that is responsible for the salvation of the state (here the ship of state), but one that brings a terrible sentence and judgment upon himself. Moreover, it is not a doom that he wishes to elude or deny. It is simply one that he does not wish to have pronounced by the common understanding.

In this sense the division between awarenesses is a part of the creation of space around the event, and this creation of space—one can call it ambiguity—is the reason for Leggatt's arrival in the presence of a young captain, who, although unsettled himself and not partner to the responses of "Bless my soul," has nevertheless committed himself to a life of singleness and straightforwardness. There is then a greater meaning to Leggatt's coming, one caught up in the inner reserves and secret resources of the Cain-Abel story. The untempted life of security at sea that the young captain has chosen is essentially a life of undifferentiation. Leggatt's intervention is fatalistic in the sense that he separates the young captain from that undifferentiated and secure life forever. From within an illusory community—in which division had already occurred—a call is issued to break with unity, to venture out into a fundamental confrontation with the self. The double, while offering a partnership of soul, compounds but does not initiate a break that may be unrecognized. Finally, the young captain must sacrifice his saving double. As Dante did to Virgil, he must slay his companion-guide if he is to achieve his true identity. The hard fact of experience is that "the other" although psychically similar, is not "the same," or the self. Momentarily their two lines intersect, but they are obliged to resume their divergent paths.

In this way, "The Secret Sharer" shows its even greater appropriateness for the Cain-Abel story. In Byron's Cain, Lucifer is not symbolically slain, even though his message is finally not endorsed. Perhaps because his message is not congenial, he does not become a true double. Although partial soul mate he does not become enough of the better other, the lost brother, to enter sufficiently into a relation of doubleness that would therefore require the second slaying. It is sufficient that his message is regarded as incomplete in the larger quest of Byron's Cain. But in "The Secret Sharer," the dimensions of the foundation sacrifice are more amply fulfilled. A dreadful, even awesome and mysterious, sundering must occur. If the young captain is to achieve his own identity, Cain must assume his traditional role as wanderer, take up his own destiny.

It is categorically impossible to understand "The Secret Sharer" without reference to the Cain-Abel story. This is not only because of crucial explicit allusions to the language of Genesis 4, but because such realization is part of the young captain's own dawning consciousness, and because so many of the exchanges, actions, and emotions are dependent upon the realization. Moreover, the so-called inner reserves of the theme help to explain the movements of Conrad's masterpiece (when he finished it, he is reported to have said, "The Secret Sharer" … is it!"), the separation from the crew, and ultimately the separation from Leggatt, as well as many of the specific concerns of the story itself (for instance, that with language).

There is no question that Leggatt in his calm and resolute and unspectacular way is aware of the role he is meant to fulfil. When he relates to the young captain the events that led to his imprisonment, he indicates that the wife of the captain of the Sephora—her presence is an exception to the normal actions of Cain at sea—would have been only too happy to let him escape: "The 'brand of Cain' business, don't you see. That's all right. I was ready enough to go off wandering on the face of the earth—and that was price enough to pay for an Abel of that sort." Later, in the most crucial exchange between Leggatt and the young captain, the fugitive explains why it is necessary for him to leave and why he cannot allow himself to be returned to stand trial:

"But you don't see me coming back to explain such things to an old fellow in a wig and twelve respectable tradesmen, do you? What can they know whether I am guilty or not—or of what I am guilty, either? That's my affair. What does the Bible say? 'Driven off the face of the earth.' Very well. I am off the face of the earth now. As I came at night so shall I go."

"Impossible" I murmured. "You can't."

"Can't? … Not naked like a soul on the Day of Judgment.… I shall freeze on to this sleeping-suit. The Last Day is not yet—and … you have understood thoroughly. Didn't you?"

Intimations are necessarily obscure, as we shall see, in the allusive, cryptic style surrounding the mystery of Leggatt's nature. The captain recoils from accepting the harsh destiny that Leggatt must accept, but then chastises himself for succumbing to a "mere sham sentiment, a sort of cowardice." The Cain-Abel story enjoins such hard choices, and, particularly in the modern dramas of the regenerate Cain, inspires great resistance. A sentiment that Melville already expressed in Billy Budd is echoed in "The Secret Sharer": there's nothing of a boy's adventure tale in this.

By a gradual process, Leggatt, the already-double, is assimilated into the captain's regimen. In fact, beginning with the moment when he puts on the captain's sleeping-suit, there are some ten references to this role as a double. What is of interest in this establishment of a spiritual twinship is the way it sets the cohorts off against the common understanding of the seamen whose lives adjoin but do not penetrate the closed circle, and the ways this relationship is sealed and insured by the secret language of twinship. After Leggatt recounts the harrowing details of the storm, the death of the first mate and his own imprisonment on that account, the link of communion between the two is tightened in obvious separation from the crew:

We stood less than a foot from each other. It occurred to me that if old "Bless my soul—you don't say so" were to put his head up the companion and catch sight of us, he would think he was seeing double, or imagine himself come upon a scene of weird witchcraft: the strange captain having a quiet confabulation by the wheel with his own grey ghost…

In fact, in his self-imaginings he seems to relish the shock value this "discovery" would provide. "Anyone bold enough" to open his bedroom door "would have been treated to the uncanny sight of a double captain busy talking in whispers to his other self." When the search party from the Sephora comes on board, the young captain protects Leggatt, thus sealing their compact and sharing his crime. He senses that he, like Leggatt, would not measure up to the Sephora's captain's requirements for a chief mate.

Beyond the young captain's imaginings of how he and his double would appear to the less knowing, the second point that stands out in this fact of doubleness is their secret communication. Their language is cryptic, punctuated by ellipses, particularly when, in the passage already cited, Leggatt seeks reassurance as to the captain's right understanding. In the perfect understanding and communion of cryptophasic twins, the one does not need to complete his thoughts because the other is so finely tuned that he can complete the interrupted thoughts in his own mind. Their conspiratorial whisper further seals them and their secret knowledge from the rest of the world. Leggatt is finally gratified that the young captain has understood.

"As long as I know that you understand," he whispered. "But of course you do. It's a great satisfaction to have got somebody to understand. You seem to have been there on purpose." And in the same whisper, as if we two whenever we talked had to say things to each other which were not fit for the world to hear, he added, "it's very wonderful."

Their communication in interrupted sentences and whispers becomes the ultimate in the communion of twins, it becomes aphasic. Finally, no words need be exchanged. Immediately prior to Leggatt's departure, the young captain, in a gesture of protective sympathy—one that will return to save him and his boat—forces Leggatt to accept his hat. This action is inspired by another imagining of the young captain, a fraternal one, as he sees himself in Leggatt's position: "I saw myself wandering barefooted, bareheaded, the sun beating on my dark poll." He has put himself in the place of the outcast, the wanderer, the dark one—like Cain. When Leggatt no longer resists the offered cap, their communication ceases to be verbal: "Our hands met gropingly, lingered united in a steady, motionless clasp for a second.… No word was breathed by either of us when they parted." From interrupted speech marked by ellipses, to cryptophasia, and finally to aphasia, the communion of twinship between them is established.

Conrad's Cain is self-possessed, even remarkable for his calm sanity, the clarity with which he weighs alternatives and then accepts his fate. This elevation of Cain was begun by Byron (although some higher motivation was already present in Gessner's Cain). Conrad's Cain even goes beyond Byron's however; there is nothing of turmoil or turbulence in him. This means of course that Abel suffers a corresponding demotion. Rather than simply pious, Abel becomes more and more typified by unawareness, even stupidity. But this very stupidity has within it the seeds of further demotion. In its unawareness it can come to represent a "mindless tenacity," the sheer instinct for survival that typified the station managers in Heart of Darkness. As Cain becomes more heroic, Abel moves from simple piety, to unawareness, to a stupidity that is self-protective; but in fulfilling this last-named instinct, the simpler Abel becomes passively evil, in essence, requiring Cain as a scapegoat in order to protect himself. Evil in this sense is ingloriously petty, not radical. Perhaps continuing the detheologized directions laid down by Gessner, the stories of a regenerate Cain do not partake of any "mystery of iniquity."

The great intellectual divisions of the nineteenth century had much to do with this reversal of roles and the demotion of Abel, a process I refer to as the "conventionalization of the ethical." In this process, Abel moves from simplicity to professionalism, or, as Joyce expressed it in Finnegans Wake, he moves from being charming to being chairmanly. Abel becomes associated with positions of authority, while Cain, completing the tandem, represents the figure of the outlaw. Nevertheless, Cain, although violating the ethical, or seeming to—and we must remember the crucial ambiguity here—actually bears witness to an older, more fundamental law and moral principle. He comes to represent the highest consciousness of the age, and this represents a fundamental revolution in the theme. Cain becomes the spiritual adventurer, trying to overcome conventional understanding, to transcend the ethical (as Kierkegaard has required) by means of a higher consciousness, moving toward the religious and the tragic in such a way as not to abrogate the ethical. This, as I have repeated (here in other terms), represents the great suitability of Cain for the modern world.

The philosopher who enunciated this important change in values and characterization was Schopenhauer, who, as Ian Watt informs us, exerted a primary influence on Conrad. In a section called by his translator, "Ethical Reflections," Schopenhauer provides in expository from the specific bases for understanding this extraordinary change in values. "Innocence is in its very nature stupid," he begins one reflection.

A golden age of innocence, a fools' paradise, is a notion that is stupid and unmeaning, and for that very reason is in no way worthy of respect. The first criminal and murderer, Cain, who acquired a knowledge of guilt, and through guilt acquired a knowledge of virtue by repentance, and so came to understand the meaning of life, is a tragical figure more significant, and almost more respectable, than all the innocent fools in the world put together.

The division between those who understand (the conspiring cohorts) and those who do not, between the irregular and the conventional, but more important, between a divided, struggling consciousness and a kind of simplemindedness becomes the main duality represented by Cain and Abel. The elevation of the Cain figure into a more significant figure was begun by Byron, but his elevation into a figure even more "respectable," that is, more meritorious and even virtuous, is a product of nineteenth-century German thought, of which … Hesse, is an even more direct heir. This development of course requires greater elaboration than the simple equation of the conventionalized ethical with stupidity. The conventional becomes the domain of the unenterprising bureaucrat whose purpose is not only not to commit an error but not to be perceived as having committed one. This also means that the purview of the law has been altered (and this division within the law itself will obviously enjoy great play in the modern versions of Cain). In the passage quoted above from "The Secret Sharer," it is clear that Leggatt is making a distinction between the law of the State, which is purely passive and negative, one might say, and the moral law, which requires a more positive (and hence more dangerous) action.

The essential division in the story is completed by the major contrast between the young captain and the older captain of the Sephora, who, I submit, embodies the qualities that have resulted in the degeneration of Abel. The conventional law as represented by the older captain is no longer moral or ethical, but is small-minded and meanspirited as well. During the storm he actually defects. In words that we are obliged to take as record of fact, Leggatt assures the young captain that the older captain (whose correct name we never quite get) never gave the order to set the reefed foresail. Into this vacuum of authority Leggatt moves to take the burden upon himself, and in so doing saves the ship. It is important to note that Conrad specifically absents the structure of authority in this work, which is so devoted to the regeneration of Cain and the intervention of the double, and more important, which is so intent on using Cain to expand a limited moral code. The demotion of Abel in a work where the sustaining patriarchal structure is missing is also part of the pattern.

In "The Secret Sharer," though, authority is worse than absent. It returns to reassert its preeminence, which means primarily to protect its record. The captain's aim is to deflect attention away from his own panicked ineptitude and to place it on Leggatt. Hence his unstinting emphasis on the event. His own nature cannot permit ambiguity or even recognition toward which the young captain wishes to direct him that Leggatt may indeed have saved the ship. "What do you think of such a thing happening on board your own ship? I've had the Sephora for these fifteen years. I am a well-known ship-master." The young captain reflects that this length of service and his "immaculate" command "seemed to have laid him under some pitiless obligation." The captain has created the scapegoat by means of an unconscious instinct for self-protection. He fails to recognize the provocation to which Leggatt responded, the possibility that Leggatt saved the ship and, more difficult to concede, the fact that these events took place as a consequence of his own defection.

What Schopenhauer and Conrad reflect is a genuine moral transvaluation that Byron helped initiate and that is perfectly legitimate. By any discerning higher law Leggatt (and following him the younger captain by contrast with the captain of the Sephora) is the more responsible and more virtuous soul. It is indeed a complicated matter, and that is the point of the regenerate Cain under the sign of the Sacred Executioner. Leggatt's role is that of a Sacred Executioner, whose virtue and whose crime—the saving action and the death of the first mate—are so intertwined that it is practically impossible to separate the one from the other. It is to this complicated interrelation that the young captain instinctively responds in his own receptivity to the double, finally now shown to be representative of ambiguity itself, and to which the unformed "Archbold" fails to respond. The more intricate weaving of destiny and circumstance is precisly the complication of understanding that Leggatt has brought with him, and it is the legacy he leaves.

All of this does not mean, of course, that Leggatt poses no risks for the young captain. The double is also divisive, separating the young captain from his ship, compounding the early sentiments of strangeness that he felt in regard to his first command. "Indeed," he confesses at one moment, "I felt more dual than ever." He realizes that "this sort of thing" could not go on for very long. The duality of his existence, the total identification with another self, the secret forms of communication, he sees literally as distractions pointing toward insanity. "I was constantly watching myself, my secret self, as dependent on my actions as my own personality… It was very much like being mad, only it was worse because one was aware of it." The presence of the double, the intense self-consciousness that it provokes, separates the young captain not only from his ship and crew but also from himself, serving to block his instinctive life. And it is here that we approach the inner reserves and the critical ambiguities that make the Cain-Abel story so intriguing and appealing.

The intervention of the double represents a growth into self-consciousness, into awareness, and it is this awareness, prompted by the emergence of Leggatt, that separates the young captain from his shipmates as well as from the older captain of the Sephora. Yet, although necessary, this growth into self-consciousness can also jeopardize the fullest functioning of the self; its self-alienation can be an enemy to a reintegration of the divided resources of the personality. For this reason, Leggatt must depart if the captain is to be restored to himself. Alienation from the crew is harmful for a captain on his first command, but alienation from his most instinctive life is far more hazardous. This is they young captain's realization:

But I was also more seriously affected. There are to a seaman certain words, gestures, that should in given conditions come as naturally as instinctively as the winking of a menaced eye. A certain order should spring on to his lips without thinking; a certain sign should get itself made, so to speak, without reflection. But all unconscious alertness had abandoned me.

We begin to see some of the real dimensions of the Cain-Abel story, the inner resources and psychic dimensions to which I referred at the beginning of this section. In post-Byronic literature the Cain-Abel story emphasizes the growth of awareness. Abel is demoted because in his innocence he lacks the possibility for such development. Part of this awareness is self-awareness. But to a certain extent, this consciousness of self represents a violation of primal innocence, of the sensed at-oneness of the individual with his environment. Hence the suitability of the violence, the sense of rupture, contained in the Cain-Abel story for the depiction of the psychic violence perpetrated when one splits up the primary self; a schism into consciousness has occurred, an act of estrangement from self and from other. This is why the character of Leggatt comes bearing identifications with Cain. As he is the force of social division, so he can also represent psychic division. In postromantic literature, in so far as this intervention of the double represents a growth in consciousness, Cain is a force for regeneration and expansion. But nevertheless, he still bears the marks of history and destiny. His calling is still a severe one. And just as he must accept his destiny, so the young captain must accept his identity. He can only do so by abandoning Leggatt-Cain.

Although the noted compliance of the double with the Cain-Abel theme serves to expand the dimensions of that theme, it is also clear that the alliance with the theme drastically alters the nature of the double. The double might come offering a kind of freedom, a noncommitment that suggests the postponement of choice; this prospect of a free-floating being could be confused with wholeness, with completion. Caught in the grips of the Cain-Abel theme, the double, although at first offering each of these possibilities, ends by being involved in a drama of choice, of identity, of history, and even perhaps, of fatality. If a wholeness is achieved, it is not achieved by immortality, but rather by the recognition of separate destinies and identities, in effect, by mortality itself. The import of the double in the Cain-Abel story is that there is a fate worse than death, and that is to be unformed, to be always other, to be a stranger to one's own life. The danger, intellectual as well as personal, is that ultimate reality be attributed to the double, to that which is derivative, while the original source of the doubling is annulled.

Cain-Abel shows its roots in the foundation sacrifice—and in turn illuminates the meaning of that sacrifice—when it insists that the double himself must be abandoned, thus requiring not one but two slayings. This explains Cain-Leggatt's double function. In setting the reefed foresail he saves the Sephora, but in so doing he acquires a guilt that will always haunt him, and will always compel his destiny to be that of an eternal wanderer far from civilization. This is why he is a Sacred Executioner. His dutiful and heroic, risk-assuming act has made him a criminal. But then his role shifts. He is even more of a sacrifical figure within the personality of the young captain. The young captain experiences some of the pain of execution, when Leggatt becomes the sacrificed other, the lost brother who must be gone. He is the other half of the twinship, one that has brought illumination, consciousness, the sense of the higher complications of event and circumstance that in some ways have suited a deeper need of his personality—hence the coming of Leggatt. And yet, in order to save himself, to realize his own identity, intimately connected with his own instinctual life, the young captain must kill, as it were, be willing to shed the saving self. To refuse to do so would amount to a refusal of life itself. In this connection with the foundation sacrifice the Cain-Abel story becomes expressive of the conditions of existence. And just as the foundation sacrifice was required to secure the entity of the state, the rule of one, so the sacrifice of the double is needed to move from duality into identity.

This decision to accept separate destinies as well as identities—despite its ultimate acceptance of what the double may at first have come to deny, one's own death—is nevertheless a stirring resolution. Thinking back to the Purgatorio, one realizes that in abandoning Virgil, Dante experiences no diminishment of the self, but rather its fuller development. So it is that in "The Secret Sharer," Leggatt, who needed to be abandoned so that the young captain could achieve his identity, had lowered himself into the water from whence he came, "a free man, a proud swimmer striking out for a new destiny." For his part, the young captain suffers no bereavement as he assumes now for the first time full command of his ship. "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."

What Conrad has effected is a brilliant reinterpretation of the Cain-Abel story. While Byron provided the larger frame for regeneration, Conrad made some highly intriguing personal adjustments. This is seen in the use to which he puts tow residual elements of the theme: the sentence placed on Cain and the much-discussed mark. The first murderer has not only become a revolutionary figure, but more importantly the upholder of a more significant moral law. Typical of the stern and complex regenerate Cain, he does not deny his guilt; he simply denies the competency of a court of law made up of twelve respectable townsmen to understand and hence to judge his fate. In so doing, he submits himself to a greater not a lesser moral law, to a greater not a lesser punishment. In fact, the fate he accepts falls under the interpretation of Ambrose: to prolong his life is to increase his punishment. And even more bravely, this modern Cain who assumes the burden of the old wanderer, does so with no special mark to ward off attack. The young captain, himself desperately engaged in trying to rescue his own ship, spares a thought for his erstwhile double: "his other self, now gone from the ship to be hidden forever from all friendly faces, to be a fugitive and a vagabond on the earth, with no brand of the curse on his sane forehead to stay a slaying hand." Cain, our true contemporary, bears no special mark, and this absence, or this unrecognizability, makes the acceptance of his portion all the more heroic. The pattern of the Sacred Executioner has a special relevancy for the Cain-Abel theme in the more modern versions intent on legitimizing Cain. But the difference between Conrad's version and the primitive ritual of blame and banishment is that society does not know that it has a redeemer in its midst. Society is ignorant, or rather, feels it in its interests to ignore the virtues of the executioner who is saving it. Leggatt makes a sacrifice that his society fails to recognize and he assumes a burden of which it is unaware. In the more modern versions of the Cain-Abel theme, and not only in those stories where Cain is a regenerate character, there exists a wide gap between the communal understanding and the agony undergone. The double contributes of course to the mystery of this discrepancy. With fuller understanding and with greater psychological realism than the useful but still schematic ideas of modern cultural anthropology, Conrad lays bare the true workings of the Sacred Executioner in human society.

This is not a story, as was Heart of Darkness, marked by an extreme split between unacceptable alternatives—a demonic energy and a depleted apathetic consciousness. By means of his double, the young captain enjoys a reintegration of forces that Byron had first anticipated in his Cain. What one might say is that, by moving out and then returning, the young captain has brought the conquest of rebellious psychic energy to his command. Formerly, as we have argued, the Sacred Executioner was utilized for purposes of public legitimation: the state was changed and preserved only by means of the historical burden assumed by the New Prince. The more modern versions of the regenerate Cain seem to promise a kind of psychic renewal. But what "The Secret Sharer" does is bring psychic renewal to the structure of authority. In this sense, it continues to allow for the more public dimensions of the Sacred Executioner. If the ethical has been conventionalized, and the demotion of Abel is associated with the decline in the structure of authority (witness the defection of the captain of the Sephora), then the role of the sacrificial Cain would seem to inspire a renewed association of that which is conventional (in this case the captaincy of a ship) with the more enterprising psychic energies. "The Secret Sharer," with all of its intensely internal aspects, is still a poem of civilization because it tests civilization's capacity to absorb elements that are discordant and complex. In this sense, the aim of the story is to return suppleness to authority. In this, of course, "The Secret Sharer" succeeds brilliantly.