SOURCE: "Unlearned Lessons in The Secret Sharer," in College English, Vol. 26, No. 6, March, 1965, pp. 444-50.

In the following essay, O'Hara asserts that the narrator of "The Secret Sharer fails to absorb the lessons of Leggatt's experience.

There are only three major hindrances to navigation in "The Secret Sharer"—the narrator, Leggatt, and Captain Archbold of the Sephora—but scarcely a critic has avoided coming to grief on one of them. Leggatt was once the major hazard. Albert J. Guerard has now warned most readers, however, by pointing out that "it is entirely wrong to suppose … that Conrad unequivocally approves the captain's decision to harbor Leggatt" [Conrad the Novelist, 1958]. We must regard Leggatt as a criminal, Professor Guerard points out, even though the narrator sympathizes with him. In skirting this Scylla of sentimentality, however, Professor Guerard is sucked in by Charybdis when he concludes that the story's narrator experiences...