SOURCE: "The Craft of the Present," in Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966, pp. 120-36.

Said is a prominent American educator and critic who has written widely on modern critical theories. In the following excerpt, he analyzes autobiographical elements in "The Secret Sharer."

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...