CON-JUNG-RAD

Joseph Conrad's The Secret Sharer uses a suspensive and elaborately metaphysical style to envelope the reader's conscience in the narrator's struggle. The circumstances and conflict that constitute and provoke the narrative structure, the story's suspensive arch, -a young captain encounters and reconciles with his literal double - coincides with the narrator's internal struggle to achieve confidence and understanding of his self. Symbolic language characterizes Conrad's abstract narration, but his suspensive style pulls the reader into soul of the character. As we read The Secret Sharer, readers become Secret Sharers, for they like the double, have partaken in a discourse of the narrator's inner-most insecurities.

'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 leveled 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.'

Everything that needs to be said about the ensuing events Conrad here says. The character is on a homeward journey, and at this point in his story he feels divided. Duplicity pervades the introductory paragraph. The flat shore corresponds to the stable sea, but both are still and stagnant under the dome of the sky. His symbolic language utilizes the cosmic to express the workings of the subconscious. Conrad's own Christian cosmology also resonates in his depiction of the narrator's soul. A trinity is formed between the land, the sea, and the overarching sky: father, son, and holy spirit, perhaps corresponding to the ego, super-ego, and id.

Conrad is very likable because his stories often explain the internal in terms of the external. He writes in a mythological style that consciously abstracts the inner struggles and realizations of his characters.