SOURCE: "The Matter of Conscience in Conrad's The Secret Sharer," in PMLA, Vol. LXXIX, No. 5, December, 1964, pp. 626-30.

In the following essay, Williams interprets "The Secret Sharer" as an exploration of the narrator's capacity for immoral behavior and his rescue from the consequences of that behavior.

In spite of the critical attention that it has received, Conrad's "The Secret Sharer" continues to present mysteries that usually affect our understanding of the story's climax in which Leggatt, the murderer and fugitive, is given his chance to escape while the ship hovers on the edge of disaster. Clearly enough, in its broadest aspects, the story is framed by a question and its answer. The narrative opens by presenting an uninitiated captain, a stranger to his ship and to himself, wondering how far he "should turn out faithful to that ideal conception of one's own personality every man sets up for...