SOURCE: "Mirrors in The Secret Sharer and The Shadow Line," in Joseph Conrad: The Modern Imagination, J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd, 1974, pp. 137-58.

Cox is an English educator, editor, and critic. In the following excerpt, he suggests that critical debate over "The Secret Sharer" is due in part to the fact that the story raises questions about the narrator but does not seek to provide answers.

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...