SOURCE: "'The Secret Sharer,'" in The Changes of Cain: Violence and the Lost Brother in Cain and Abel Literature, Princeton University Press, 1991, pp. 109-21.

Quinones is an American educator and critic. In the following excerpt, he examines Conrad's treatment of the Cain and Abel story in "The Secret Sharer," asserting that Conrad "expand[s the psychic and moral dimensions of the story."]

What Gessner's Der Tod Abels was to the second half of the eighteenth century (and beyond), Byron's Cain was to the nineteenth century: each was a work of some originality, signaling a change in sensibility that in turn helped to spawn generations of followers. Conrad's "The Secret Sharer," rather than initiating a period of reinterpretation, actually caps a near-century of development (and in this, of course, Conrad remains, pre-modernist). Conrad carries on and develops the patterns and devices of regeneration that Byron introduced to the...