SOURCE: Erdinast-Vulcan, Daphna. “The Seductions of the Aesthetic.” In The Strange Short Fiction of Joseph Conrad: Writing, Culture, and Subjectivity, pp. 30-50. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Erdinast-Vulcan asserts that the captain-narrator of “The Secret Sharer” expresses a conflict between an aesthetic and an ethical mode of being.

The statement, ‘I'm a man’ … at most can mean no more than, ‘I'm like he whom I recognize to be a man, and so recognize myself as being such.’ In the last resort, these various formulas are to be understood only in reference to the truth of ‘I is an other’, an observation that is less astonishing to the intuition of the poet than obvious to the gaze of the psychoanalyst.¹

To be embodied, to become more clearly defined, to become less, to become more limited, more stupid.²

[I] turn to “The Secret Sharer” and study the...